blips

// 250530

What is the shape of a choice? How does it lie present in the body? When is the path the right one?

We are naked in the desert, of all places. Just Burnt Man in the center is a landscape of raging coals, radiating heat so hot that when I turn my face away, I can feel my face get cooler, the thermal boundary between 'hot' and 'not hot' trailing down my cheek like a horizon line. Rotating my face moves this horizon. If the coals are the sun, then I am the moon: waxing, full, waning.

With a few hundred other people, we walk around the ashes of the Man. The ashes are massive, maybe a few hundred feet across. Everyone is sepia, nude but backpacked, ashes and orange-glowed. The crowd, the gyre, rotates counterclockwise. Are we all entranced in this walk? I am present, but also somehow doggedly focused on experiencing what might emerge in this process, somewhere between like a ritual, or an high school chemistry experiment you might do, carefully pipetting one solution into another, biting your lip, brow furrowed in anticipation of what might occur. We are those furrowed brows, as we walk around the man, feet folding against playa dust.

At one moment I decide to go clockwise, against the throngs of people. M and I had noted this earlier, the seeming consensus around everyone's direction, so my impishness emerges and I figure, why not? I tug on my friend’s arm, and I turn, her following me semi-hesitatingly, and suddenly we are swimming upstream, confronting people, everyone's nakedness more on ventral display. This is not without a quiet hilarity - when have you had hundreds of naked bodies moving towards you? But the strange and strangely interesting focus of this ritual grounds me in this walk. We find a groove, walking closer to the coals. Maybe one or two people join us, trailing behind in the lee we're creating.

M says to me: "Nobody seems to care that we're going backwards." She sounds surprised, and I’m surprised by her surprise: nobody does care; this is Burning Man, after all; there aren’t a lot of forwards to be backwards from. But she repeats it again, almost to herself. I glance at her fireglowing face; there's a slight expression of wonder I cannot understand. I get the sense that she has rediscovered something I cannot see, or has arrived at an invisible place. As if someone who might encounter the ocean and push their toes into the water and say to themselves, "it's the ocean", the obviousness of a statement revealing the traversal of some internal geography, there and back again.

Maybe I am witnessing the moment that a statement actually arrives in the body, the dense reality of the world meeting the paper-thin weight of a word, the broken tip of the signifier iceberg being resettled onto its referent base. It's the ocean, one repeats, with emphasis, after wet toes. It's the desert.

Isn't it funny how you can remember a particular moment with such vividness? A crystalline fragment, etched in your mind, emerging at a point in time.

Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or BPPV, is a phenomenon that occurs when "tiny calcium crystals called otoconia come loose from their normal location on the utricle, a sensory organ in the inner ear." ... "If the crystals become detached, they can flow freely in the fluid-filled spaces of the inner ear, including the semicircular canals (SCC) that sense the rotation of the head ... causing vertigo and jumping eyes (nystagmus)."

My father had this for a moment a few years ago, and we were getting worried that it was a neurological issue. But the solution to BPPV, it turns out, is to perform a set of physical movements called the Epley maneuver. You lie on a bed, and move through a prescribed set of movements that help the crystals move out of the semicircular canals: turn your head left, lie down, turn your head right, and so on. He did it, and lo and behold, the vertigo was gone!

The movement of the body is a series of abstracted operations that spool outwards from the geometry of the inner canal. The body moving about, driven by a logic located elsewhere, intended to move small crystals around a spiraling canal. To find your balance in the world, you might move your head in a spiraling fashion: an isomorphism between the world in your ear, and the experienced world outside.

These words too are a kind of isomorphism, or a mapping, a certain kind of maneuver meant to try to understand. Do the sequence of anecdotes and comments make any meaning in of themselves? Not necessarily, but together I am attempting to construct a certain kind of maneuver. Through the set of maneuvers, something is being moved, towards balance.

A few summers ago, K, at the Black Rabbit in Greenpoint, tells me: false desire is when you feel like you HAVE or WANT to do something. I remember looking at her, uncomprehendingly. True desire might not even show up as something you know. The idea that I might not know myself had not occurred to me, this distinction between the ego and the psyche not experientially understood. How else would I know what I desire, if not knowing who I am and knowing what I have or want to do? Is it possible to not know who you are? Or could that be even desirable? To always be discovering one's self?

The taoist approach would be to not try to discover, nor not discover, I think, all of this verbiage in many ways missing the point, but also living the point.

A closure emerged for me a few years ago when I realized that 'not being satisfied' could in of itself be a kind of satisfaction; the satisfaction of being someone who would be never be fully satisfied. Thus: to be enchanted by dissatisfaction is to seek answers in of itself, a kind of stable instability, the joy of the eternal quest, the process of seeking, of walking in of itself. Does that make sense? It did at the time, because it didn't have to, because there was nothing to do, nor nothing not to do, but to follow along with the events that were unfolding, I myself part of the stream I am in. There's no getting away from the self, because even someone who tries to get away from the self is fully themselves in being someone who is trying to get away from the self. We might as well just be!

Through these words I risk this not making sense, or sounding trite, or like semantic wordplay, or perhaps even obvious: it's the ocean! But that is just the nature of words that point to experiences; open the Lonely Planet's Guide to India in a hostel in Ulaanbataar and it is meaningless, unhelpful, but open it up sitting in a stepwell in Delhi and another shape of our evening might unfold. This writing, itself another maneuver, pointing to the spiraling canals of our inner world. Through words there is a place to be arrived at, or, if I have learned anything, either a place to never fully be arriving at, or a place we have already arrived, where we have always already been. It's me, with wet toes.

// 250512

What is the tone with which one writes? Or speaks? What to do with the chasm between you and I? Is this writing for me, or you, or for us? For a public, for a private? The term 'pillow talk' exists; as does 'bed talk'/ Can we traverse the intimacy gradient in inverse, slide towards 'dining room talk', 'foyer talk', 'couch talk', 'porch talk', 'street talk'? Do we want to?

We are at the house next to the Seon center and H, a monk, is leading the choir in practice. It is a spring day and the birds are chirping. In her pre-monastic life, before H became ordained (pabbajjā, or in Korean, 출가, literally left the family), she was trained as an opera singer in Munich. She is radiant, beaming as she directs our intensely civilian affair of a choir, full of so much humor and kindness that I feel like I am close to a small glowing sun.

As we sing our voices crack, and tremble. Part of her work is to continuously guide us into hold the shape of our sound, as if it were some kind of viscous material to be gathered on a table before it starts flowing away. Instead of telling us what kind of sound to make, she guides us through metaphor that seems to contain within it the seeds of the sound we hope to create.

Think of your body like a pipe! she laughs, a pipe, in which you are pushing the sound downwards. Don't let the sound rise up! Push it down, through your belly, and out! And so we do, and so the sound changes.

// 250430

Every summer evening is a portal to another summer. What do you do with a sadness so sweet it imbues the world with beauty?

On this summer evening I wonder. Will this be my life? Whom do I love - or rather, not love? One of the wild consequences of doing metta and vipassana every morning is that I feel myself more and more a well of abundance, of tender love. More and more I suspect that the questions are not about who to love, but about how: how to love, how to love well, how to love the passerby on the street, the dear friend, the person who thinks of you as an enemy, this or that tree, and most of all, the sun..

—

Rereading the above I wonder: will it make sense? Does it make sense to you? Will it seem saccharine, or corny, or trite?

In a final semester review yesterday I said that a student’s project was about experience, not knowledge; that the institutions and societies we live in prioritize the acquisition of knowledge, less so tools or practices for experience, in ways that we might have a hard time seeing outside of, the way that a subject of an ideology sees with the tools of the ideology. I said: by necessity, designing for experience requires the thing to be a little partial, something slightly missing, because it’s meant to be adjunct to life, the self help book or travel guide or map meant to exist while you’re hiking in the territory; a particular koan or instruction helpful while you’re exploring. The finger pointing towards the moon is missing the moon. “It’s only a finger”, one says, and then they’re missing (literally) the point.

But to return to love. (Who are you, reading this, by the way? How do you love?) I used to consider love a concept, or maybe something rare that was meant to happen between romantic relationships, rather than a kind of resonating quality that the world can be imbued with, lived with. Of course, this statement too can be taken too literally, as a concept or a knowledge, rather than the texture of experience, the quality of life rubbed between thumb and forefinger, a sentiment that cannot usually be communicated with words or language unless we try to use our words slant, using them to point outside of them.

—

I take a bite, chew, and exhale in delight. Can you believe how this tastes? I might exclaim. Oh my god, I might say. I wish you, too, were here, eating this. Oh my god.

—

Take delight in the longing when language fails, when even this writing fails: let it fail, let the gaps between words and the world flourish, let us try to articulate how we feel and what it mean and know that, to paraphrase Rumi, beyond semantics and meaning there is another field, in which we might meet.

// 250416

Yesterday, in our dance studio, I imagine my intention gathered into a shape; neither ball nor arrow, neither pointed nor formless. What does it mean to do without trying, non-doing, to be loose, neither fall into craving nor aversion, equanimity with intention?

We move with wooden swords, the six of us, dancing around this studio in barefoot laughter. The game is to play with swords without attacking each other. The aim is to find the space between dancing and combat, so that a hit might land as a simple touch, rather than a harsh jab. When your partner finds a way to 'cut' you repeatedly, it's a moment of shared laughter, a recognition of discovery. M speaks about it as us showing or teaching possibilities to each other.

I move with A, and find an action or spiraling that continues to move outside of his form. His shape is particular, no doubt from his martial arts background, and there are particular moments of approach I feel continually drawn into. He is form, structure, clarity, and I admire the approach and I also see how water can seep amidst his cracks, how resistance can occur through refusal, as the blade of my sword flies around, evading the intended place of contact, as if touching the underbelly of a turtle. But then his form slides through my watery shape, his sword rapping sharply on my wrist, and I can’t help but laugh.

After almost half a year, I find the texture of my movement changing. I wave the sword like a wand, its tip spiraling. I am aiming to not to try to move the sword, trying to move outside the texture of thought.

(I am circumnavigating around the inarticulable. This, always the task of language. Turning around its center. A circle described as the set of all points equidistant from one point. A uniformity of distance crafts the circle; the circle implying a center. Language circumscribes an absent center.)

If there's any central project that occupies me currently, perhaps it's a pursuit of texture, of exploring "how" rather than answering a "why". Someone yesterday who I hadn't seen in years asked me what I've been up to. I respond here and there, but how would I explain that one of the most fascinating research projects of my life might also be one of the most personal, or rather, experiential?

How is this project to be shared, if at all? How do you share your experience with others on a hike? Are there tips, tricks, possibilities? Is there a common datum? To what extent is experience generalizable? I think about Hesse's Siddartha speaking to Govinda that wisdom, unlike knowledge cannot be communicated. Then what do you do with a sangha?

(After I write the above the answer strikes me, of course; the purpose of a partner is to teach each other the possibilities of what we don't know that we don’t know, to elucidate our weak spots, hopefully with laughter...)

// 250215

"I was radicalizing students", K says, over a bowl of 오뎅 in 서울. It is December and it is winter.
"Radicalizing", I repeat, turning the word around in my mouth.
"I mean, that’s what I was doing", she says, "or at least trying to. I was teaching them history. Most of them didn't understand." Her words hold anger, but I can’t sense if her tone is also regretful, or lamenting, or matter-of-fact. Maybe all of the above.

We are sitting in a corner of a small restaurant. The restaurant is decorated in such a ramshackle homegrown way that you can tell that each gesture is a residue of a memory: the mural, the motto scrawled on the wall, the handpainted tables. I am sure that if I asked the owner, he would be able to rattle off the stories embedded in each decoration. But currently he is drunk, (pontificating loudly) in the corner of the restaurant with his friend (strumming folk songs on a guitar). The scene feels, not unpleasantly, like a caricature of a k-drama (Now, writing this, it occurs to me that he probably half-knew what he was doing, enacting the romantic drunk, the Fool, invoking a spell that descends onto the room. To embody an archetype is to call in a kind of magic.)

T, my friend with a clown practice, once told me about the process of crafting a Grotowskian mask. From the depths of your unconscious you start to move, chat, grunt, dance, shaping clay as a medium to channel and discover an archetype that emerges unbeknownst to you. The idea, it seems, is to unearth a part of your psyche that was always present, and to then practice putting it on and off, or even layering multiple masks on and off of your being. Crafting a collection of masks, or personas, offers the possibility of fully expressing your psyche, as opposed to your ego, to speak in Jungian terms. Sounds like deep, deep magic, I told him. I think he nodded, gravely, and then grinned.

I consider asking K: is the anger that is discovered or expressed through radicalization important to you, is it load bearing, does anger help construct the foundation of a structure? But I hesitate, partially because I can't sense the place from which these questions arise. It’s as if I’m looking into my body as a deep well, following a ribbon that threads through these questions. Instead of finding the original source, the ribbon tied around an intention, or emotion, I'm simply witnessing it disappear down into the dark well, clouded under dark haze. Experience has taught me that questions asked from an unknown origin are often questions also meant to be asked to myself, so I consider keeping it inside instead.

One thing I try to say out loud later during a different conversation is that: I fear that dwelling on the wrong kind of so-called-political anger eats us up, that the fierceness against them and certainty of us it offers us is a Faustian bargain, an intoxicating drive that offers us a semblance of solidarity but without sangha. Or perhaps it’s a passage, a moment to move through. Sometimes I think of Goenka’s discourse that you might run to kick and trip a child who is running towards a cliff if it was the only way to save its life: necessary violence for the sake of saving the person. Or the Tao Te Ching, which talks about going into battle with gravity: war should be conducted as if were already a funeral. But the words come out wrong, and J responds with a polite but fierce indignation, saying that Israeli is oppressing Palestine (yes, I say), and that it’s a superhuman feat to expect Palestinians to advocate for peaceful balance considering all they’ve been through (yes, I say).

I agree with her, I tell her, and say nothing more. She pauses. I feel like I am expected to offer resistance, but I do not, because I do agree, in the way that the truth is composed out of all of the parts, I think, the whole piece of the story, and I feel her frown a little, I wonder if because I did not put up a fight. There is no fight, I think, I am not your opponent, I think, or should anyone be. The point is that it is devastating when people are dying, no matter who it is. But am I being compassionate or complacent? I consider trying to go on further, that in the beautiful and necessary pursuit of protest it is also possible to lose sight of what it means to accept and love, that lest we know ourselves fully, we end up repeating cycles, of my growing belief that the only certainty is in a doubt and openness to a possibility that connects us to others, rather than rejects the other and cleaves sides in the name of being on the "right side of history". But I do not know say it because I do not know if this conversation is possible here, or perhaps if it is even offensive and privileged — and it also then occurs to me that these thoughts too might also be my way of fighting, myself also imbricated in the same things I am wanting to point at, so I just smile, and we move onto other topics and laugh in this tiny magicked restaurant with its tipsy owner and his guitar-laden friend yodeling songs, ringing in the new year.

—

At contact improv this week I am concerned that my antennae aren’t as sensitive. I already know that I have been forgetting; soon might even come the possibility of forgetting that I have forgotten, I fear. But I consider Alan Watts’s note that an emotion is experienced with its emotion; I’m not just apprehensive, I’m apprehensive about being apprehensive. So, accepting my first-order apprehension, I move the way I might, feeling into what comes to me, not trying to force anything, returning to the truth of the self, whatever it wishes to tell me.

This time around the purring energy in my chest is familiar, not surprising. Lying on the wooden floor with my chest to the ground I let it simmer, wondering if it’s still anger or in fact something else, but I let it play out, finding it spill into my shoulders and arms, letting it start to roll my body around. I am like an 오뚜기, a round-bottomed toy filled with a heavier weight inside, so that it might roll and flip in seemingly unpredictable and incongruous ways, driven nevertheless by the consistent logic of my center of gravity. I am moving, stretching, weaving in and out of conscious thought, trying to stay in that place of non-thinking, eyes half-closed.

I can tell, while dancing, that I am in a different place. Something is lost, something is gained, my antennae are dulled, but in exchange I have received something else, a certain kind of movement. It’s like I got used to spice and now my tongue can become more adventurous, but the quietude in tasting soft winds and deep waters is no longer as accessible. Can I still listen, I wonder. Do I remember how to? Or: what is recuperated, what is learned? In the process of focusing on following myself, do I lose out on the possibility of moving with someone else?

I have been noticing that moving with others has gotten a bit complicated, somehow not quite meshing, movements intersecting in fits and spurts. How are we sharing weight? Does he, she, they, expect something from me? Do I have one ear on myself and one ear on the other? I occasionally look at certain duos and see how graceful and fluid and energetic their movements can be, and I wonder if I might want to attain that kind of energy, but then I notice that my body just wants to move slowly, it says, maybe even glacially, in a room full of whirling dancers.

So that stillness, I follow.

I leave these words here as a trail. I read over what I've written and I am sure that there is something else laden in these words, some kind of underlying message that might be revealed. I don't know what it is, so to share it is an act of trust and faith towards the future, maybe, or a request for collaboration: to listen together.

250115

I'm writing here to grasp a memory. Sometimes an event occurs and you find yourself grasping for it even as it happens. A collection of memories strung together, beads on a necklace, a montage, a sequence of stories cut together. What does it mean to love a film?

I'm in Seoul. It's frigid, inadvertent white clouds emerging from mouths. 인사동 is where meandering tourists go looking for Traditional Korea. I am here, too, neither tourist nor native, my ontology always shifting, my relationship to this country always transforming, as far as I can remember. The familiarity of transition, the usual question. Who am I here, this time?

This time around, I find that part of me lands neatly into this world, sinking into a mattress you jump on at the store. Memory foam, they say, with advertisements of handprints sunken into the bed, as if the material would remember for you. In its remembrance you are supported. Or maybe I'm noticing the parts of me that emerge to align with the world around me here, my self an oceanic universe, the fishes in the ocean of my body swimming towards its kin, the Koreas in me wriggling to meet the Koreas I am surrounded in.

At an intersection this person suddenly emerges from my right and starts speaking to me. 안녕하세요, he says, a little out of breath as if he had been jogging to catch up to me. Without any context, he immediately tells me about my future, my disposition, the ways in which I might be withdrawn, or settled, or engaged, and what I might need. It feels like he's pouring something out of himself. "There's a treasure in my left hand", he says, as well as a phrase I don't quite catch. His comments are spot-on in a way that makes me feel suspicious, or makes me want to see around his phrases.

Let's talk at a cafe, he says, with pen and paper. I study him a little, try to look into his face, tune into what I'm noticing. There is a kind of opacity there, and yet a kind of clarity, as if I'm trying to ascertain the color of glass; glass will say that it's transparent, but look right and left and catch the color of reflections and you'll notice that most glass does have a subtle color; sometimes a kind of bluish-green tint. His eyes feel like this kind of glass, and I wonder, where are you, is he glass, does he want something? And then, also: what am I doing, the person who is skeptical of this, from where does my skepticism arise, not just from self-protection, but am I attuned enough to be open to the possibility of a sincere encounter, as opposed to a scam?

Another person joins him, the two of them in expectant openness to me. They are in their 20s to 30s, perhaps slightly younger than me, with a kind of earnest openness. They tell me that they are doing 공부, literally studying, but also a term that I've come to know generally means spiritual practice. I ask them questions - about the lineage of their practice, how often they talk to people on the street, and all the while I am trying to feel into my felt sense. Either they believe in what they are saying, or they are making themselves appear that they believe what they are saying, and the line between the two is thin: underlying a practice is a kind of commitment that allows you to lean in with your weight, the way that running involves leaning into the place-you-will-soon-be.

They say: "Let's go to a cafe and talk; we'd love to have a conversation."
I say: "We're having a conversation right now, aren't we?"

I see forking futures. One path leads towards a conversation over tea, which will then roll into involving some request for payment for reading a fortune, small enough that I can oblige, large enough to be meaningful. I will come away, not feeling scammed necessarily but also feeling like I've been floated away on a current, somewhat to be parted with my money but also strangely quizzical at how the whole thing happened, begrudging acquiescence shimmering in my body. In another path I walk away, let it go, and let my curiosity simmer.

In another path the conversation over tea becomes something more meaningful, and I find the kinds of conversations I've been seeking -- careful, deliberate, thoughtful, circling around the questions at the center, neither piercing it crassly not avoiding it, the way you might hold yours or another person's spirit: cupped in both hands, gentle but not shy, careful but not afraid, enthusiastic but not reckless, firm but not grasping.

I choose the second path. I tell them, smiling, that if we ever run into each other again, then it will have been 인연 and that then I'll buy them tea. They smile, disappointed but accepting. 안녕히가세요.

I walk away for a few steps, and I stop for a moment. What am I doing? Here I am, the magic of an encounter; a different me would have said yes, their pores open, understanding that each encounter is a moment of risk and possibility and self-discovery. Am I wanting to preserve the mystery of the moment rather than risk disappointment, I wonder, and I am reminded how much the task of the moment is to be more disappointed, this season's compass needle tells me to navigate towards my relationship to disappointment, disappointment, disappointment.

I rush back towards where we met, following the paths I thought they took. I keep on jogging down the street but they are gone, mixed into the crowd; of course they are.

Later, I think about this moment many times. It's a simple moment but somehow it feels like a fulcrum, a reminder, a lesson. Would it have been better to be disappointed? It occurs to me that I am doing something, crafting something more then a moment out of it by continuing the possibility of possibility, the memento of possibility worth more than the reality of disappointment. Is this the treasure in my left hand that I do not open?

Words fall flat. This is more of a record than anything, a dream scrawled in my dream log upon waking, trying to capture something in my hand so that I might find the shimmering truth within. It strikes me that this is more of a log about practice than it about theories or arguments, a record of something that is inside of me but not about me, if that makes sense, the way that dance is also about finding the movement that wants to emerge.

At contact improv last night I talk with S, who reminds me that part of committing to a practice is having trust in it. Trust in a practice invariably elicits the presence of doubt, questioning, concern, which are perhaps signposts on a trail, in a way.

In the middle of dancing I find myself a little out of tune, a little less honed in, my antennae picking up other frequencies. I am not fully present, I am elsewhere, a two-body problem, two planets orbiting around each other, a gap between where I am and what I am thinking of, most probably because I'm still holding a kind of melancholy in my body, a kind of tape delay, words repeating after each other. In the short film Ohayo by Satoshi Kon you see a woman waking up in the morning, visual trails of her past self delaying behind her like ghosts, sluggishly getting out of bed, brushing her teeth. As she starts waking up this delay narrows, her selves narrowing into alignment until she's present and awake, "おはよう!" I feel the trails behind me, I am not fully here, something about my dance strangely becoming performative, strangely strained, as if I am dancing for others as opposed to dancing inside of myself.

Once I read a story about a psychologist who had an old-fashioned hook for a hand. Someone asked him how he felt about the hook; he replied that it was a barometer of sorts. 'When I feel good about the hook, then I know I'm doing well. If I feel angry or upset about the hook, then it lets me know that there's something inside of me that needs resolving'. The notion of the hook as a barometer is strangely liberating. I think about this story as I move, I brows furrowed, trying to find the paths of movement, trying to find the channels or lines that my body already wants to follow; I am simply the listener, the follower, listening for what wants to emerge, as opposed to trying to control it. If there's any faith here it is faith in the presence of a self that is yet to be discovered, like a parent discovering their child as it grows up, except it is me and myself, noticing myself in self-discovery, part of this task of commitment to the Jungian psyche rather than the ego (-- says the ego, always momentarily forgetting that commitment here requires a kind of surrender and devotion to the self).

241227

Two winters ago I am on a street in Seoul in a 포장마차, perched on red plastic stools and a blue plastic table, eating abalone and drinking soju. I am with Y and we are savoring and retracing the echoes of the connection we had a few years before, feeling the crackling energy of rediscovery and honesty open up between us, ignited by stories of loss and death. Something about the particularity of the environment allows an incredible honesty, the precarity of the thin plastic membrane holding in the warmth, the 아줌마 cooking at the nucleus of the cell, everyone huddled in the cytoplasm, pouring out their hearts to each other.

I, too pour my heart out to my friend who listens with great grace about a deeply painful situation I went through. She is open, listening wholeheartedly. After I'm done, she says a few words that later turns out to be the best advice that anyone has given me.

(Later I tell my dad:

특별한 부위기더라고요.

and he says:

그래, 정말 특별한 분위기지.)

What makes this honesty possible? Something about the thinness of the gap between business and life, the 아줌마 not a cook or business owner but simply a person, or rather, a whole person, her energy suffusing the atmosphere of the tent itself. There is no branding, no decor, no design, no advertising, no hosting, no cleavage between back of house and front of house. If design is a kind of poisedness, like when you clean your house meticulously before when someone comes to visit, then what is the space of life when you live with a partner, or yourself? The space of the home as it is, mess and all, already whole.

"Have you ever crossed a land border in the developing world", S asks me. No, I haven't. We are on the Trans-Siberian railroad and I am twenty three, traveling alone from St. Petersburg to Seoul. We are at the border between Russia and Mongolia, where the train has to stop for a few hours so that customs guards can check everyone's passports.

I met S and A, an unlikely pair, on my meanderings through the train. S is a seasoned traveler and conflict negotiation expert working in refugee camps; A is a recent college graduate. It turns out that there's an absent third person, X, who explains their connection. X is the daughter of a recently deposed politician recovering from a sex scandal. A and X were meant to travel together, and S was enlisted by the politician as a kind of bodyguard, but after the scandal X backed out of the trip, leaving S and A to travel together. It seems like they're awkwardly trying to settle into an older-brother younger-sister sibling dynamic, trading jabs and jokes at each other while we’re playing cards somewhere between Irkutsk and Ulaanbataar.

At the land border I witness a special kind of chaos; people waving bills, fanny packs stuffed with cash, holding calculators. It's a currency exchange market. With a calculator and bills, exchange needs no language. One seller eyes me. I show her rubles and point at tugrik; she taps a bunch of numbers into her calculator and turns it towards me in a placelessly universal gesture seen in markets everywhere. Having researched the rate beforehand I shake my head and tap a counteroffer. She furrows her brow in slightly exaggerated surprise. We go back and forth, the tension between us stretched like a taut rubber band, bouncy and vibrant and conflictual, until we settle on a price, at which point everything immediately settles into a straightforward business-like clarity. She hands over a series of bills with mechanical precision, waits until I count them, nods and walks off without ceremony to the next prospective client.

—

I’m not sure why this memory emerges in relation to the 포장마차. Perhaps it’s something about the possibility of complex relations emerging out at an edge, the border between here and there creating the currency exchange, but here was the whole operation laid bare, arbitrage manifested in each seller’s overstuffed fanny pack, no teller sitting in front of a panel full of red LCD-panel numbers, just a hawkish haggler with their strategy, at the end of the day, pieces of paper exchanged back and forth, Marx’s money-form laid bare.

At the 포장마차 too, the 아줌마‘s station was in the middle, her rummaging through coolers, water from paper cups hanging from an old 2L water jug cut to act as a dispenser. No back of house, just a small world, objects at the scale of a life, maybe. Or maybe this is just the product of too much nostalgia layered over itself that it threatens to render my memory as pastiche. Or maybe this is itself the charm of a 포장마차; you are already inducted into its spell, the spell of no spell, of bare life, the plastic tent needed so that you know how much you’re already here, so that you might pour your heart out to a friend, and vice versa.

Seoul too, this visit around, is suffused with a certain kind of emotional density I cannot quite name, as if the city is built underwater, and its denizens already aquatic, so that you might at first glance mistaken it as any other place, but it turns out that there are some indescribable motions that you see people enacting with their arms that propel them through space; a wave of the arm and suddenly there’s a breeze (really, a current), or you sit at a particular cafe and feel the ambient warmth of the people present before you, an afterglow. In this water something more is perceptible.

241119

Hello, reader.

Sometimes I wonder if, after an experience, if the events are not too fresh, still too molten to handle, too sticky, not tacky. Give it some time and it will cool, gradually finding a darker shade of red, graspable with tongs, perhaps stretched or manipulated into different shapes. You must move fast, rapid but not rushed, moving at the speed at which memory gradually cools into place, if in fact the task at hand is to work with memory, not with story, not with construction or craft but rather a kind of practice of dipping into the world, a kind of devotion towards this: (with my right hand I form a cup, gesture as if spooning water up from a source).

I aim to write rapidly, not rushed, but the material is still molten, sticking everywhere. I will see what I can do.

Tonight, L is playing at the jam. I have been looking forward to this day for months, now, to find what might emerge in this dance. On my way to the space I realize I am a vibrating string: excited, nervous, tense. L is a living legend, and even though he comes to some of the jams, it's another thing entirely to have him perform, an incredible treat, an honored guest imbuing our little community with even more magic. I rush into the door of the building and suddenly decelerate as I encounter K and M and T and L himself in the lobby. As we stand still and rise in the elevator, perhaps it's just me, but seems we are hushed and nervous, something stirring, a kind of buzzing energy in the air.

Is it ever sexual, D asks me last week, referring to contact improv. It can be, but I find it usually undesirable, I say. At the jam two weeks ago I was moving alone, eyes half-closed in that half-trance, and I suddenly felt someone approach me and touch their body with me, as it happens. I found myself whirled into a dance, sliding past each other, arm to arm, hand to hand, body to body, finding what emerges in the alchemy. Unexpectedly I found arousal emerging on the horizon; something about the quality of her movement, and our touch, some unpredictable pheromonal mix, shifting our dynamic from physicality into sensuality into sexuality, proximity and movement, intimacy and closeness that approximated depth rather than dance, encounter rather than experimentation.

Is there really a difference? I don't know, but it made me uncomfortable, or rather, it felt like sexuality was diluting the practice I am here for, somehow obscuring the clarity of it, and I had to shift out of it, finding another person to loop into our dynamic, until we became a triad, undulating and morphing together, and then I gracefully exited, leaving the two to move together in the ways they would wish to.

Touch is inevitably connected to sexuality, which is of course crucial and to be celebrated, but orthogonal to it there is also a kind of movement that cannot be named, like tapping into an internal river that glows, an alignment with a nameless magic, a process of discovering, as if your body already knows what to do, and the listening is what is necessary. Does this make sense? Is it possible to articulate this?

It's somewhat uncomfortable to write about sexuality in a contact improv context, but it feels necessary to name, and inevitable in a practice that involves bodies coming together and touching each other. It happened tonight, too, in which I danced with someone somewhat inexperienced; I could tell that our movement was being directed into a place of sensuality rather than of movement, and I understood, because: normally, when else do our bodies deeply collide with someone else's body? Arms touching arms, hands touching hands. I was enjoying what we were crafting together, but I could feel her guiding it towards a sensual exploration. Energy has many rivers; I imagined waters flowing down a mountain, finding familiar paths to flow into, but her familiar paths being different from mine, and the waters of somatic movement continually sliding into the river called sensuality, try as I may to pull it back into the river of practice.

Eventually despite our dance something arose in my chest, a kind of impatience, because, tonight! L is playing! And suddenly it was clarified: I am not here to connect with one individual, I am here to consecrate what we are all finding together, the regulars who come to this thing we do, the unnameable this that arises in our space. And so I had to wind things down, gently shifting our dance so I could hold her hands and gently close her own two palms together, then disconnecting the touch by placing my hand on my chest (thank you), and smiling wordlessly and as sincerely as I could, despite the flicker of confusion that dashed across her face, no doubt because I had shifted out somewhat awkwardly, but she smiled too, and then I moved away, knowing that I could not explain in the moment; how to talk about what is present here, not to follow sexual or sensual movement here, nor to cast it away, but to focus on the glowing practice at the core of this magical place, the thing that is revealed, both vibrating and still.

How to explain this center? I am trying to name something that cannot be named.

At the start of the jam, lying prone on the ground trying to hear the tangle in my chest I hear my name; it is P, whom I had invited to this months earlier, who brings me a cup of chai. In deep gratitude I give her a hug and tell her how glad I am that she is here.

After I lie again the wood makes contact with my chest. I listen into what is present. The subway thunders overhead, passing over the Brooklyn Bridge. Suddenly I remember the person who sat next to me for my ten-day Vipassana retreat last August, this placid and peaceful boy, telling me afterwards that on the last day, he found himself full of anger, and that he found its presence confusing, and I have this image of a cork being unseated, of diluvial flows seeping, eventually gushing forth, and I wonder if this is what I am present for, a soft anger that roils in my chest, perhaps aged three years. It is vibrating, frazzled, chattering, and I am somehow unable to calm it down, a buzzing center, and so I decide to move with it, dance through it.

In elementary school in Korea we used to construct these rubber band-powered airplanes, lightweight constructions made out of balsa wood and thin sheets of tissue-like paper superglued onto the wings to form an airfoil. The rubber band was a hefty band stretched between propeller and tail, and you wound up the band turning the propeller in the reverse direction with your finger. The band would twist in a particular pattern; first, twists in the band would build up, then each twist would twist upon itself, creating these meta-twists that would look like small knots, but then these knots would gradually populate across the entirety of the band until the band would appear to be much thicker... and if you kept on winding, these knots would twist upon themselves, creating even larger meta-meta-twists. If you kept on winding, these meta-meta twists would proliferate across the band, eventually appearing as if the band was one thick rope, perhaps ten or twenty times thicker in diameter than the original rubber band, and that's when you knew you were done, when the loops were looped on top of the loops that were looped on top of themselves.

In my chest are these looped looped loops, and I imagine straining to pull it taut, full of vibrating lumps, but then I see M, and he and I greet each other with a hug, his hugs so deep that I find respite inside of it, warm and giving, and after twenty seconds I am loose, somehow, limber, more loose than knotted, graceful, open, settling in, my body opening into (re)becoming antennae.

I am not saying this right. I am getting it out all wrong, in the way that, to paraphrase my favorite quote by George Box, all words are wrong, but some are helpful. What are these words for? Why are you reading? The impossibility of articulation. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the jokey saying goes, so is writing about dancing like music about architecture, necessarily ambient, open, stretched thin to live with the world? I am trying to cup an experience between my hands, hoping to remember; I am antenna, trying to tune in; or as Edward Abbey says in Desert Solitaire, trying to use the fishing net to pull up the sea.

(What am I saying? What are you doing, reading this? Flee, flee, let me shape this molten lava, let me encounter this later, edit it into portions that make more sense so that I might find what it is I am looking for, later. Writing as evidence, writing as encounter, writing as archeology, writing as surfacing the possibility of something I had overlooked, writing in order to unearth, to dig up, a montage of protagonists sweeping the dirt off of a buried treasure chest to show text that reveals: ____.)

A series of snippets:

Afterwards, R tells me that he takes the day off of work and commutes in from Pennsylvania for this jam, every two weeks, for the past year. Behind a casual articulation of logistics lies a deep deliberate intention, and I also know what this means for someone else, what this glowing evening makes possible.

At one point L is playing, translucent shimmers I recognize from Day of Radiance, and I am moving, and dancing, and stretching out the thing that is inside of me, allowing it to speak, or maybe it is pouring into my limbs and making them move, and I am trying to maintain that space of following, held gently so that I am not performing but following, listening, sensing, surfacing. My right arm moves in a circle and suddenly I feel a kind of alignment, impossibly clear, as if my right arm is running along a kind of track, but a track that is not a track, and I just follow, smoothly swinging my arm around, following and finding the gesture that emerges, tracing it through and out and around, noticing too how my body is shimmering, out of tiredness or something else I cannot tell, but I am moving slow, finding how I am aligned, finding how I am following.

So many dances, so many moments. With A we move around, somewhere between contact and just a dance, sliding, jumping, stirring, until we find a rhythm, we stomp, and jump, and hover around a center, and someone joins us, and we are a three spoked-wheel, and then a fourth joins, and then another, and we are a five-spoked wheel, stomping and dancing and breaking into laughter, laughing at the joy of it all, at what is possible, the brilliance of what this could be.

At another point I meet T who smiles at me, and he and I stop and move in a slow non-contact-contact, the palms of our hands not-yet-touching, focusing on the connection that we are holding. Time slows, elongates, and some part of me is aware that we are the slowest people in the room for a moment, while another part of me whispers to myself, thinking, letting that thought pass. A few weeks back he told me, your energy is getting stronger, and somehow this time I want to whisper inside, but T, today I am arriving frazzled, but I try to settle into the soft familiar sensation that feels either like relenting or accepting. A pair of dancers crawl under our hands as if through a tunnel, someone jostles him jokingly, and we crack into laughter, before the seriousness settles back into our faces, still underneath it the joy of it all, a lamination of seriousness and silliness.

M's grin, C's enigmatic smile.

I swirl around the space at some points, I move around, and what I like to do is to go shopping, or picking flowers, but picking up movements, moving and following someone else's movement for a moment, before continuing and finding someone else's, a jump, a hop, a skid, a crouch, a roll, whatever seems to align, not thinking too hard, just finding the gesture that I notice, and following it, trusting deeply in myself to notice what I notice, and so I move through the space, saying hello with my body, not necessarily wanting to be in contact, but finding ways to align, to resonate, to learn from others, my own soft way of moving from myself and opening my ears to others.

What else? What is noticed? So much. (Later as we walk out C says: couldn't every day be like this? Couldn't it, indeed.) Sometimes when I move I try to be in metta, hoping to glow, because why not, why not, we are all trying to get to a place here, coming here for a particular reason, a certain practice, all quite different. In the middle of a dance today I see S again, who, as she passes, wordlessly smiles and squeezes my shoulder in friendly hello. A few months ago, she told me that finding this felt like a homecoming, and I think about it, the quality of arrival, the ways in which we come here, this delicate place and space and loose community that I have grown to love so much, the clarity of not asking anything of it but joining the bonfire and bringing my own movement and snacks to share, these moments that have, without exaggeration, changed my life.

As it becomes nine thirty, M dims the lights, and L leads us to a shimmering close. Gradually everyone in the entire space orients towards him, starts to sit and listen, and as he glides us all towards an end he sits in meditation, and I sit for a moment too, my knee quietly touching T's foot as he lies on the ground, and to my delight I feel piti rippling through my body, the concert-high jhana for the joy of this all, and the entire room sits in silence for a moment, and I open my eyes, and L somehow looks at me (!) and smiles, his hand on his heart, and I do the same, beaming and sending a silent thank you, and then the applause starts, small and thunderous at the same time, we are hooting and humming, we are sweaty and exhausted, we are crisply present.

241027

Lying in a tent underneath the stars you wonder about the nature of memory. Does a story of the present involve a continuous unfolding onto what happened in the past? In a Magic Eye image you cross your eyes, meet flicker and alignment until pattern disappears and figure appears. Kim Stanley Robinson writes about climate fiction, says that one eye must look forward into the future, one eye onto the present. I am here, one eye in the present, another eye in the past, encountering a Remembrance of Things Past. Does the world eventually fill up with madeleines, smelling of groups I am part of, have been part of, will be part of?

In this grassy field away from the group I am still, both ears and environment, listening to the sky change over the trees, seeing birds and wind. (These words feel stagnant, well-worn, maybe because this relationship to nature is also a well-worn one. Novelty sometimes involves a dismissal of what is already present. What to find already in the old?)

Around the fire M asks us what the best meal we’ve had is, and all I can think of is the 신라면 I had on top of 한라산, impossibility divine noodles after a winter hike, shared with dozens of other people drinking broth in the snow, eating with breathless exhaustion. All the more delicious, because I knew I was bringing the deliciousness; mass-manufactured 라면 suddenly achieving apotheosis, nirvana. How to explain the depth of this flavor, the magic of these noodles, other than to know that the deliciousness was in me already! You know? All foods already the best meal you'll ever have. Relishing shapes a dish, expression transforms the experience. Finger pointing to the moon, later licked in savory moment. You know?

241014

"Yeah, I've been shot", F------ answers, index finger pointing at his knee. We're sitting in Ramallah, the West Bank, Palestine, the dusty courtyard of a renovated Palestinian home, in the shade of a tree, on a beautiful breezy summer day. He talks about it matter-of-fact, neither flippant nor showy about it. "It happened during the Second Intifada". He also says his cousin died. Or his brother? It's been thirteen years, so my memory is hazy, but the thought that I cannot remember itself fills me with a strange kind of guilt, as if an inability to remember a death properly is emblematic of the situation, the history, that world.

Later, we walk by an Israeli settlement, full of identical-looking buildings with red roofs. The buildings repeat across the landscape in arcing rows, so that the surface of the landscape becomes duplicated by the curvature of the red roofs. The entrance to the settlement is gated, with a guard and rotating metal turnstiles that extend two or three meters high.

"I wonder what people in the settlements think about it", I say out loud.

"You can go in and talk to them", I--- says.

I turn to look at him. His voice is strangely clear, his expression absent of any kind of vitriol or resentment. If anything, there's a kind of confidence, as if to say, go, see for yourself, a confidence strangely tinged with melancholy.

"No, really. You can go in. I can't, but you can", he says.

I look at the settlements, the metal gate, only a dozen or so meters away. Some kind of fear grabs ahold of me, hazy and indefinite. We're with a group, and I can't lead us astray, I say to myself, so I demur, saying, 'maybe later'. Even as I say it, I think I'm making the wrong choice. He looks a little disappointed in me.

Now, looking back thirteen years later, so am I.

To go to East Jerusalem from Ramallah you have to pass through Qalandia checkpoint, a massively trafficked checkpoint controlled by Israel. Most foreigners and tourists will go through a car with special yellow license plates, or a taxi, or a bus. We decided to go through on foot; I think I wanted to see what it was like, and got the group to go together.

Qalandia checkpoint is constructed of a maze of metal gates and turnstiles. Once you enter, you are in a queue and shuffled like cattle with hundreds of other people, all of whom are Palestinian. Nineteen-year-old IDF soldiers holding assault rifles roam around, barking orders with a certain kind of bravado.

What I expected but could not have been prepared for was the feeling that my life was no longer in my hands. At that point I had done long solo trips to Russia and Mongolia and China and India and had considered myself moderately well-traveled, with enough street smarts to navigate an urban environment in a ‘developing country’. But in the checkpoint, I got the sense of intense hostility, not from the people we were with, and not just from the guards, but from the system itself, as somehow I gradually felt myself reduced into a unit, a human being with my life and interiority becoming a mere number. No doubt it was the soldiers holding assault rifles who clearly, and obviously, did not care about our lives, but it was the entire system that lived and breathed some kind of otherworldly air. This was beyond bureaucracy, beyond the drudgery of lines waited in DMVs or airports, instead a kind of indescribable minimization of the self. Where was my life? Somewhere else I could no longer grasp.

Almost immediately when we stood in line, the people in front of us turned to look at our crew - people who looked asian, hispanic, as well as white, clearly not Palestinian. Silently, this older man gently pushes my shoulder forward, encouraging us ahead to move in front of them.

No, I remember saying, it's okay, we'll wait.

But he continues to gesture and push me ahead, as if to say, don't be silly.

I think we said no, it's okay again, at which point someone younger and more fluent in English says: We're going to take a long time. Go ahead.

Again, without enmity or resentment, or hierarchy or deference, simply speaking a truth, from one person to another. Was it almost brotherly, comrade-like? And as the people in front of us turn around to see what's happening, they wave us forward, too, so we start skipping the queue.

Somehow the queue of people parts for us, somehow, the people in front, in front, keep on waving us ahead. There is clarity and resignation in people's faces, and I feel incredibly apologetic, but nobody seems to appear upset or annoyed. And so we progress through the meandering steel enclosures, as if somehow batted through to the front, as if we weren't walking but rather the crowd of people are pushing us forward, go ahead, go ahead.

Eventually we get to the front. There are IDF guards barking orders and getting everyone in line. When they see us the guards are surprised a little, and their voices soften. Maybe they even ask us, what are you doing here? This too is outrageous, devastating at the time, the way their faces changed, as if seeing us as real people, which of course meant: what were they seeing everyone else as, before?

Even now, the particular kind of resignation and acceptance in everyone's faces is etched into my memory. To know the reality of the situation, of control and subjugation. To let it be part of your life. Every once in a while I think about the people who pushed us forward, who said, Go, go ahead, and I wonder if we should have waited, wondering at what it must be like to see these foreigners come in to the gate you take every day for work, and to encourage them to go ahead, knowing that the wait will be hours for you, what kind of relationship with your life you have to hold in order to do so, what kind of subaltern relationship with this checkpoint you might have to hold, the fine line between resignation and acceptance.

Earlier on this trip we had gone to Petra, Jordan. Or was it afterwards? I can't remember. I haggled a little bit with a local Bedouin guide and rode on a mule on a winding hike up out of the canyon floor. Maybe it was to a monastery, or maybe just up to the plateau where you can look down onto Al-Khazneh, the archetypical postcard image of Petra.

The mule was somehow diligent and unbothered. When I got on the mule it allowed me to do so almost without a sign, as if it hadn't noticed me. I got the sense that it recognized me as its rider, but also was somewhat on autopilot, following the guide's mule in front, and climbing ahead steadily.

At several points, the trail narrowed, and the mule was stepping dangerously close to the edge, sometimes a hoof landing less than a foot from an edge of a canyon hundreds of meters below. There were no guardrails, no liability-obsessed safety protocols, no guarantees, just you and your body and the world in which things happen. I remember thinking: if the mule missteps, it will slip, and we will both fall to our deaths. I am trusting this animal. Do I trust this animal to put its foot in the right place? Am I really placing my life in the hands of this animal? Worry rising in my throat like sour bile.

Sitting on a horse or a mule involves spreading your legs, saddling the animal. Between your legs is the fleshy body of another being. After some moments of anxiety, I recall the worry somehow sinking lower in my body, moving through my legs to dissipate into the mule's body, as if to say, yes, here you go, here is my life, I trust you. Thinking of my life somehow close to the mule's own life, the glowing spark of the mule also carrying my spark. Suddenly, I am grateful, perhaps even deferential to this mule, who knows much more than I do. I had ridden on a horse once or twice before, but this was the first time I had ever trusted a non-human being with my death as well as my life, perched atop a precarious trail winding around a cliff. No guarantees here, just a trust in another. I realized I was simply re-engaging with an old story amidst ancient ruins, the ancient relationships that humans have had with animals, to trust another animal with your life, your glowing life with their glowing life.

This is all to say, in the steel pens of the Qalandia checkpoint, there was no kind of trust here, rather my life grabbed and separated from my body to be crudely hung on a meat hook, in queue to be processed. Maybe this frame seems melodramatic, since I had all the privilege of an Asian-appearing person within a US passport on an academic research trip, with a racial appearance that would afford relative political neutrality (as in, apparently neither Palestinian nor Israeli) and a legal foreigner/traveler status in the eyes of the IDF soldiers, and so I knew that I would be fine. (I hoped.) But even to be proximate to that particular sentiment of bodily disposability, or hostile fungibility, was a shock, something that I had never experienced before, elsewhere. To this day it's clear to me, difficult to describe but clear, like a faint but definitive aftertaste you might have in a food that alerts you that something isn't right, you tasting your tongue and closing your lips repeatedly, eyebrows furrowed, until you realize that yes, something strange and metallic is present, something underlying that is casting this whole dish into question, something undesirable yet in urgent need of being tasted, so that we might know, so that we might not be poisoned.

thirteen years ago I find the log in which I wrote:

"I go to Jerusalem and I couchsurf at S's house and I meet her groups of friends. I talk. I meet her friend Y, who is firmly warm and studies literature and spent a little while in Israeli prisons because he didn't want to go to the military. we talk.

I sleep on her balcony, one of the most comfortable nights I've had in a while, and I wake up to the sun in my eyes. shimshon (samson) the cat rubs his face against my hand, and again it hits me how physically hard animals can be, how solid their existence are, how rooted in the fleshy and bodily they are. they are beings, beings.

while petting shimshon I talk with S in a strangely low whisper about this and that. it's quiet out, it's the shabbat, and nothing is open. israel and palestine. she thinks about it every day, she says seriously, and I believe her. by the way her hand moves in the air I can tell that she's recalling countless conversations she must have had before. she is conscious and careful and I listen to her tease out these dilemmas, and I feel myself bringing these emotions into myself, trying to see what she does, what her friend Y does. it is important for me to do that. it is important for me to wander the streets and the closed-down market, an ultimate sunday morning in new york, sunday morning summer morning -- except here it's saturday, the shabbat, everything winding down, and I feel the city exhale, exhale, exhale."

The night before I remember talking with S and Y about Israel and Palestine in a group the night. I was asking all of these questions with naivete, wondering what they thought about Israel and Palestine, what it was like to live with Palestine next door. At some point S got slightly upset, and said, "why are you asking all of these questions to us? What are you trying to do? Why are you here?" The group fell silent.

I was surprised. (If I was perceived as trying to do something, I wondered, what could that be?) I wondered if I might have overstepped as a guest, and said something like, "well, I'm just curious, and want to know," half-truthfully, in that it was the truth — but the real truth was that I could not at the time understand how anyone in Israel could not be thinking about this all of the time, how this wouldn't always be present. But I didn't say that.

S then said something like: "It might be interesting to you, but this is life for us! Every day!" Had I surfaced something that was foundational? Maybe I apologize; I can't remember. The conversation awkwardly switched to other topics, leaving the rest unsaid, until it was time to go to bed. I fell asleep in a sleeping bag on S rooftop, lying awake wondering about this world.

Years later I understand what she meant. How to hold the question about an unacceptable way of living that one already lives inside of. I remember Y saying casually that he was in jail for a little bit as a result of refusing to go to the IDF, and the way he shrugged it off, in retrospect evidence of his deep story underneath the surface, deep conviction towards refusal, towards ethics. As a result of his conscientious objection it was difficult to get a job, he had also mentioned. S says she thinks about Israel and Palestine every day. What it means to live in a world and to try to do the right thing, to speak against oppression. We were in our early twenties, then. What are they still doing, I wonder? Still protesting, I hope.

Later, I am in Tel Aviv. Jerusalem is ancient and complex but Tel Aviv is beautiful and breezy, I admit, Bauhaus architecture and beach culture, twenty-somethings partying at clubs. I join a protest that J invites me to, and see a hundred thousand people march for something -- better economic conditions, they say, youthful energy towards a better world. (Now I wonder: how much of this protest was a redirected repression of outrage about Palestine?) The bathrooms don't have "please conserve water" signs in it, I keep on noticing, because we are not in Area C, or B, or A, but we are in Israel. Everything is too shiny, too clean, too new, as if the air is about not knowing what is happening just next door. Not knowing, or pretending not to know, or needing to not know.

thirteen years ago I wrote:

"the paradox of travel is that, having been here, I am the opposite of an expert on palestine, I regress more, I lose information and perspective. do you understand? I change. anecdotes become my world. palestine becomes a series of hills, towns, places, breezes on my cheek, laundry flapping in the air. squinting underneath the sun. palestine becomes this couch I am sitting on, the adhan ringing and ringing and ringing over the valley, the smell of cigar smoke in that cafe, the overenthusiastic boy who hands me some knafeh, the hellos on the street, eager throngs of kids who ask me, what's your name? and so on. I lose sight of the government-palestine, and the people-palestine, and I am looking at these persons."

241010

what is intended here is a kind of channeling. writing neither as information nor story, but as event, or as residue. leaning over you touch the residue with your fingers, rub words between index and thumb to get a sense of what might have happened here, what patterns exist.

tracking is the art of following animal tracks in nature. last summer at a bookstore in Point Reyes, California, a book tells me that tracking involves deepening into one’s intuition, widening the senses. the closer you get to tracking, the closer you get to the animal’s experience; the closer you become animal; the closer you become human. tracking (without hunting) is about entering, or re-entering, another way of life, it says. I am convinced.

here, I am tracking with words.

—

there are four existential questions we cannot and perhaps must not fully resolve, I keep on saying to friends and to people, according to irvin yalom. they are:

isolation; freedom; meaninglessness; fear of death

later I wonder why I share this. to me, there is something liberating about this, an alternative to ‘happiness’, a kind of impossible construct akin to satiation. we are metabolisms, we are cycles, we have high and low tides. anicca. and then what? what do you do when you are dropping ashes on the buddha? I look out onto the horizon and the crispness of a city skyline from where I am writing this, clear dark polylines against a goldening dusk.

yesterday I am going home on the train past midnight, which means that the car is filled a familiar mix of tired withdrawn people holding the day’s stories in some corner of their body. save for some quiet conversations, everyone is slouched, sinking into the seat, gazing at a phone, staring into space, or half-closing their eyes.

at some point between stations, a older man in his 80s, sitting in the corner arises slowly and ambles over near me. even though there are empty spaces everywhere, he gives a younger man sitting next to me a look; the younger man, confused, gets up and cedes his space to the older man. the older man sits down, and then turns to his right to acknowledge the person next to him, who is also an older woman in her 70s or 80s.

do they know each other, I wonder, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. did he want to talk to the woman, in a potentially creepy way? but that didn’t seem to be the case either, as he then just sat in silence, minding his business. his energy is self-contained, not reaching. I look around the train, and realize that almost everyone is in their twenties to fifties. I wonder if it’s possible that the older man just wanted a kind of companionship, or solidarity.

what will it be like to be 80, and look out into the world? ‘old people’ have always existed in my lifetime as part of ‘people who are older’. as a kid or teenager, nearly everyone is older than you, and as such, perhaps there’s a way in which it seems like everyone across ages might belong together, constitute the ecosystem of humanity, a neat set of scale figures in your renderings representing an age-diverse population: babies, kids, young people, adults, older people, et cetera.

but now I am hesitant to accept the easy coherence of this model, or at least, to see through this image. what will it be like to be in our 80s, and have everyone be younger than you? a lifetime of memories and so much of the universes you knew are no longer alive, a kind of aching loneliness at friends and parents and grandparents who are gone, even while you might delight at the younger people in your life. perhaps you might look around a subway car and see everyone much younger than you. perhaps that might compel you to sit next to someone your age on a midnight subway, quiet momentary solidarity for a phase of life.

(all of this feels a bit cliche, in retrospect, which is usually a sign of an experiential truth that is difficult to convey in language, the words more operative as lightweight signifiers, pointing, or like the flimsiness of a ticket stub, a parking pass, a camping permit, a receipt for a road map, two or more degrees removed from the thing at the center of it all that nourished your soul.)

R and I drive around the Hopi mesas last summer, just me and him in his car. he speaks with a quietude that resonates with certainty, sadness, and solitude. occasionally we take a walk out to look out over the land from the mesa tops. during the pandemic, R tells me as we are walking, many elders died, and he realized that his generation was it, was it, was the torch to continue the ceremonies, to pass down the secrets. to be in your sixties is both young and old. we are now the elders, he kept on saying, as if newly discovering something that he always knew but didn't quite see. who else holds the memory? and for a moment I imagine the weight of a long lineage of people resting on his generation’s shoulders, only eleven thousand people spread across three mesas, bearers of responsibility for the journey that the sun makes across the sky.

in G’s studio I gesticulate and try to say, I want to talk about these things, this thing we call life, but is more than that, the thinly sliced radish held between forefinger and thumb, what a person constitutes of, what a life is made out of. the secret, or at least, my working theory these days is that: once you move past the fear-of-death-sublimated-into-a-desire for eternal-life-sublimated-into-certainty-through-knowledge/intellect/fame/wealth, you learn how precious and delicate a life is, and you cannot help but realizing how precious and delicate your own life is, too, and each others. us all here in the order of things, amongst the world of all living beings, all tangled together in indra’s net, wriggling our way into and out of being through joy and suffering. something like that. either you are against some people or for everyone. I am halfway there, I think, halfway on the way to being here, going there and back again, having been there and then coming here I am now there again, and such is the nature of movement and dancing, or climbing a spiral staircase.

as I write this in transmitter park, the sky is now night; the horizon a dark burnished bronze turning into deep blue. the city is alight, this gorgeous chaotic lonely lovely place full of life, this place I have called home for almost two decades. what is next? wherever I might be. there are no neat endings to a piece of residue. let the evidence speak. fingers a-chill. time to go home, read this later, perhaps find the moons that it points towards and let it disappear into memory.

241008

I tune into the stations tonight. rotating the dial, I move in and out of movement. what is present for me? I write in order to surface this. you, you who are reading this, are invited to read in so far as you are reading. if you are reading, you are invited to read, a tautology.

sitting in D's car a few months ago after a concert (young fathers), I tell him a story that emerges up on the spot, somewhere between my head and my mouth:

A painter has been struggling with finishing a painting. something is missing in the work, and they know it. they have been mulling and pondering over what this something might be for weeks, now, spending their time scrutinizing the canvas, hands on chin, hands on hips, frowning at the work.

the painter asks other painters. they say: add gestures, remove gestures. the painter tries their suggestions, but it doesn't work.

the painter asks art critics. they say: name it, or frame it, talk about it, look at it in a different light. the painter tries their suggestions, but it doesn't work.

one day, the painter runs into a monk on the street. the painter, in desperation, thinks that maybe the monk might have something to say. the painter explains their situation and gets the monk to visit their studio.

upon visiting the studio, the monk listens to the painter, and examines the painting. after a moment, the monk comments, calmly: I see what you're missing.

what? what? the painter asks.

the monk says: you are missing the realization that the painting is done!

at contact improv tonight I am somehow out of tune, out of sync, not able to fall in so deeply. perhaps it is the music, this halting dissonant jumpy moment that doesn't let us rest but keeps us heady, bouncing, and I feel the ambient energy of the room also buzzing, scattered. there is more laughter in the room, more oscillations, less steadiness. with many people I am a little off-tune, not quite listening, or not quite listened to, and find myself sliding all over the place, as if distracted. perhaps I am.

I move with L at some point. he likes to move slowly, and so do I, but he also likes to grasp the wrist, which I found myself disliking, wanting to either make the dynamic mutual by my grasping of his, or by my sliding around and avoiding this being-grasped, moving through the flow. I get the sense that I am being slippery here, but still we move together, in motion.

at some point it occurs to me that maybe he is teaching me something. he is old enough to be my grandfather, as well as, well, being a world-class musician. maybe I should follow or listen, I think. is this within the dynamics of contact improv, I wonder, but then let myself drop that, because what is happening here is a little bit more than that, a little looser, because aren't we all listening to our intuition and moving? or at least, I am, and that's who and what I hope to be in contact with. so at some points I let him guide and move me, wondering if I am resistant to learning, resistant to being guided, if part of my own desire for mutuality and equality is actually a manifestation of my own inner resistance to deference. if I were more open, I think, I might let myself say: I wonder what could be learned from this? and go forth with curiosity, trusting in the solidity of myself to retreat. instead, I insist on something else, I realize: if you're going to grasp my wrist, I shall grasp yours.

I let that go a little bit. I learn to learn another way, a little bit.

at J's birthday party a few months ago I meet someone who has a zen practice. at the center, he says, once during a sit, he was craving freedom from zazen and was trying other practices. the zen master could tell, and spoke to him. what the master exactly told him I can't remember, but it may have been something like: that's your inner tyrant speaking.

at the party, I am surprised. I feel my eyebrows rise involuntarily. inner tyrant! I say.

yes, he says. the master didn't elaborate more, he says.

this phrase follows me around for a few months. it's still following me around. could a tanha, a clinging to freedom, be a manifestation of an inner tyrant?

in not wanting my wrists to be held, am I closing myself off from learning from L? what L thinks is beside the point. what matters here is the orientation I bring to the world. who is my tyrant? do I know him enough yet, I wonder?

one more movement with M. I notice that I am floating in and out of focus. the music, choppy, sample-driven, glitchy and synthy, brings me in and out. I am wavering. still, we move, and I focus on the energies between our palms. I tune in and out, and I can barely feel him, but he's there, and so we move.

at some point I realize that I am sweating profusely. sweat is beading off of my forehead, dripping down onto the ground. I am moving slowly, glacially, and the room is cooler than the summer, window open to an autumn evening's chill and the sounds of the occasional train over the brooklyn bridge, but I am making sweat. something is truly happening here, I think. maybe it's my exertion at turning into this faint signal. something is metabolizing within me, some circuits shifting.

still, the signal is faint. it was bound to happen one of these days, I think; each jam can't always be a revelation. losing focus is inevitable. focus drifts during anapanasati all the time, and bringing it back is the perennial task. to continue, to continue, is the task. tonight I am scattered, glitchy, choppy. I could blame the music, and I kind of do, but I also attempt to surface the lesson here. what is present? what do I need? where am I? where am I returning to?

240930

I am full of writing these days, I think. I’m not sure why, but the words are present and they spill out of me. Or perhaps it’s the other way around; the words that I might write shape my understanding of the world. Together we are in twin orbit, moving around each other. At a meeting yesterday someone says that progress is like climbing a spiral staircase; seen from above, it looks like you’re circling endlessly. Me and my words, in circular orbit, fraternal union.

I think I write because part of me is convinced that there is something to be arrived at, here, some quality that can be touched. This is distinct from planning a lecture or articulating a thesis, which feels a little bit like mining for truth, searching, following, on the hunt towards the core of some illuminatory logic that would transform the world. (Remember, the first time you read Foucault, thick photocopied readers underlined and notes scribbled in the margins walked the streets of Broadway, head aloft with an idea that might shape the world anew.) For some reason I am loathe to try to articulate a concrete thesis, to frame attention in an intellectual way. I am newly skeptical of intellectuality, or cognition, because it seems like in the interface between cognition, emotion, and intuition, cognition can sometimes scrabble to climb onto the top of the heap, to plant its flag. cogito, ergo, ergo, ergo.

At a psychedelic therapy training yesterday we talk about the particular quality of play that we’re aiming to support through attunement and curiosity. Marked attunement, R says. I try to ask questions about how he knows when he’s done, when the moment is ripe, when he chooses to end the intention session and transition to medicine. “You just know”, he says, and dissatisfied, I think for a moment the difficulty but necessity to finding words that allow a relationship to intuition — words that do not collapse an intuition but uphold it, support it. The response to the perceived dominance of category and language is rarely to do away with all language, but to find more ways of seeing, to see into, to see all of it. A door is not just a door but a collection of hinges and knobs and wood or metal, but those too can be decomposed into their constituent parts, and ‘parts’ too are not stable entities but rather assemblages of objects that perform particular actions and thus have particular affordances. Doors can be sliding, hinged, folding, curtained. Are we looking for objects-that-look-like-a-door, or assemblages of objects that perform door-hood, that have the affordances of doorness? Etc.

Or I think: to know nature well must be able to hold simultaneously terminology (estuary, riverbed, embankment) and also to loosen it, a little bit. ‘Seeing is forgetting the name of that which one sees.’ I see dirt, and soil, and water, and slope, and liquid. I am able to forget at many levels, I think. R clarifies the difficulty of medicalization, of pathologizing mental illness, disorder, depression, psychosis, and I hear the air quotes around each of these terms, which I understand, deeply. But then I want to ask — what next? There are air quotes around ‘river’, always, as well as ‘depression’, or ‘psychosis’ or ’knot’. What is a knot? Is a knot a thing, or is it a phenomenon? Where is knottedness?

If I’m to articulate my working amateur theory it is that any kind of psychic state is a kind of a self-perpetuating system, like a flock of birds murmurating, or a modular synth patch repeating, a game of life iterating. Most people are in relatively self-perpetuating states, but no states are fully stable, and they require constant tuning, adjustment, inputs and outputs. A ‘stable’ state does not mean ‘without drama’, it just means that the system continues to operate self-similarly without any external intervention; an anxious-avoidant chase between two people, for example, is a kind of stable state that is likely to continue, a homeostatic feedback loop like a mechanical governor that modulates the distance between people. Too close, and avoidance kicks in. Too far, and anxiousness kicks in.

The stability of a system and the desirability of the system to its individuals isn’t necessarily related. Or in other words: we can be in ‘stable systems’ that we dislike or that are healthy to ourselves. Changing these systems are often difficult, because even the typical methods or levers of change themselves are parts of the system - e.g. the anxious partner saying, “I want to change this dynamic by talking about it”, which itself is part of the dynamic, of course. In the introduction to Leverage Points, Donella Meadows says that we can often find leverage points in systems — and can witness people trying to push in the wrong direction with those levers! This is the same idea as the so-called ‘Chinese’ finger trap, in which the woven paper or fiber construction binds the two fingers. Tugging straightforwardly on the trapped fingers tightens the woven tube that thus traps the fingers further. No coincidence that ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) refers to this finger trap as another kind of bind we can put ourselves in. The answer to this trap is to gently push while twisting. Knots are rarely loosened by tugging on them, and crude attempts to transform a system are quickly co-opted into the system itself — or already part of it.

—

from the Tao Te Ching, verse 29:

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not think it can be done.

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

240929

I am sketching through this writing, each individual pencil mark loose and raw as the shape emerges beneath, within, in aggregate. notice not the mark but what occurs between the lines; read not the words but what is held in the spaces between.

A dear friend, T, is applying to a residency. In order to do so, T has to articulate his practice, which means an attempt to articulate a practice born out of the impossibility of articulating the inarticulable. I read over a rough draft of their artist's statement, the series of words they write and I imagine the sound of someone stretching, straining, the muscles in someone's body pointing, or as if watching someone's brow deepen and furrow, a set of hands deftly clenching. A witness to searching effort, of yearning, that I am still outside of. (T, if you read this, know that this is meant with love for your searching nature!) I witness the searching, but I am not part of the search, I think, and I tell T this, in words that are much less eloquent. Tell it slant, I keep on saying, find a way to circumscribe your project, to move around what you are attempting to say. To attempt to articulate it directly is sometimes impossible. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

So here, too, I attempt to move around the edges of a truth that I try to touch, running a finger along the edge of a framed mirror, or a ceramic plate, enjoying the sensation of smooth coldness on my skin. Here it isn't, but it isn't not here, either.

In Santa Cruz last summer I see A, and after touring his studio, we went for a bite to eat and took a walk along the coast, meandering around the tide pools. Because I am especially interested in moments of transition, I ask him how he came to move. While stepping carefully from rock to rock he tells me that enrolling in his film program was instigated by a film he started to make during the pandemic, which was then instigated by a film he finished during the pandemic, which was a film he had started ten years ago but had never completed. "I thought about the unfinished film every day, for ten years", A says to me, “until during COVID I found myself working on it, even finishing it.”

Ten years! I think, and at first I feel compelled to obligatorily laugh at his turn of phrase, until I meet the sincerity in his eyes and know immediately that this was real, and the depth of stories present here. I know what that's like: what it means to cradle something in your heart and hold onto it for years, to turn it over, and over, like a peach pit held in the mouth, like a stone held in the pocket, a knot fingered, tenacious even if worn smooth, both willing its disappearance and loving it, at the same time.

Maybe that's what I love about talking with people, more; what draws me towards finding a practice in working with people in this era. In the air I can sense the presence of stories, the deep story, the kind of story that changes your life irrevocably, the kinds of stories that have always been there, the stories that you finally flip the other way around, like a pancake, revealing the golden (or burnt) underside that was always present, so that you might see the story (and your life) as a whole event. In each person's telling of the self are the clues to these stories, clearly present if you listen for it. Listen closely and something slight alerts you to the presence of joy and sorrow. Find a space for it and something else blossoms, something emerges. Each story a partial clue to this thing we're all trying to do, this quest, this particular incarnation, this act of breathing again.

After I hug goodbye to C, who is closing her chapter on this city, I walk away, feeling the resonance of an ending. 여운, I think, listening to a gong slowly reverberating quieter, and quieter. At night the streets of Fort Greene feel particularly resonant, sleepy. To walk alone and quietly in these streets is a gift, I think, the pleasurable space of solitude, inside of which the afterimages of a special encounter, a tender connection might peal out. This sound, too, lies inside of a shape that I trace with my finger. This, too, a particular moment I may or may not remember. Like geological strata, these events constitute my being. Under the pressure of history, these layers may congeal and liquify, blending into each other. We are landscape.

240926

(I write because I am certain that these moments hold lessons, something to be revealed only with time.)

this time we are moving with wooden swords. swords! M says: we meet at the point of contact, a foot or two above the wooden hilt, on the wooden blade. our points touch, my wrist ideally neither strained or cocked, my body oriented loosely and firmly. In the point of contact we meet the other.

In this room we dance around. I am listening, noting, aware of where the other is. but this time we are in gentle combat, wishing our blades to meet the other. As such we are in dance: dancing forth, away, avoiding, moving, piercing. I am more afraid of hurting the other than I am of getting hurt, I notice, as my wooden blade dips in and out. There is always the art of retreating, of dancing away, and I also start to learn ways in which I can rotate the blade to push my partner’s swords to the side in a smooth motion, maintaining a point of contact. We are fighting, and we are not.

M slows the motion down, and encourages us to move at a continuous, slow pace, as if we are in slow motion. With this slowness, he explains, you can experience the moment of impact, or the moments in which the blade comes close to you, and move through the fear response. For a moment I imagine fright and flight as singular substances we might be able to touch, like dipping a hand in a bath’s hot water, gradually moving though surprise, pain, fear, to settle into accustomed sensation, expectation, perhaps even relaxation. The tip of his sword swings past my face in slow motion, and I see it, and for a moment that’s all I do. In that infinitesimal moment I wonder if I am present with fear, or if I am frozen. We keep on dancing, moving, playing.

When I first moved to New York for college, I would walk around the east village with my camera and wonder what might be happening in each building. The city appeared full of subterranean mysteries, possibilities, and each author I read from this place made me imagine that books were being spun up out of air in a cramped bedroom somewhere, a city stuffed with dreams, of striving, of a certain kind of unknowable magic that was present. Find the right room, and magic would be happening there, I thought, walking the streets of this city at nineteen, seeing the world through a photographer’s eye.

(recently I commented to a friend that NYC’s collective culture comes from the culture of the subway; not just the nature of public transport, but the dirty grungy nature of a century-old 24/7 transit system, a kind of raw subterranean subconscious that everyone enters, navigates, and emerges from, that perhaps hopefully suffuses the city’s denizens with a sense of interiority meant never to be pristine but old, constant, ever-running. you regularly withdraw into your bowels and see your plumbing, your own third rail.)

In any case. In the studio dancing with M and C and M, I continually feel this. This is magic, I think, this magic is present here, here I am in this room, discovering a way of being. Maybe years later it will become natural to me, just part of who I am, the way that meditation is gradually becoming. Or maybe it will continue to unfold, move in depths and layers, the way that meditation continues to do so, already. For the moment I am at the cusp of change, these practices are new, so I encounter them with the fresh excitement of someone learning, gulping a glass of ice water. Inside of this magic we move, laughing, grinning, but also focusing; we are serious but not solemn, playing but for real, finding something in this dance, meeting inside our swords, at the moment of contact.

240924

as I enter into the building that houses the contact improv studio, I meet someone I recognize from previous jams. in the elevator we make momentary conversation, using words awkwardly. no matter. movement and contact will soon become the primary language.

as I enter the studio I take off my shoes, sign in. in the back of the room is the liminal layer of hesitation and preparation, where everyone's bags are. I put my bag down too, take off my socks and jacket and outer shirt. in the room, a few people already moving, slowly. the space is meditative and quiet; one of the perks of arriving early. immediately I decide to enter in as I usually do, finding a spot in the deep corner near the performer. somehow I feel strangely confident and clear about finding my space in the room and inhabiting it.

I do not need to wait, or be afraid, or hesitate. this is because I am not here to perform; I am here to do something. I am here to find something. I am here to get somewhere. I am here to find an arrival. I am not here to express myself, or to do a good job, or to have 'fun', even though I will find myself in laughter many times later. I am here because I am a finger trying to reach the moon; I am here because I am trying to touch something that cannot be touched.

I start on the floor. we are like logs, slugs, worms, or at least I am, gradually feeling into whatever may be present. sometimes it starts in the body; a particular sensation that I am trying to draw forth. what I am aiming to get it is nowhere else but a kind of uncovering, a peeling back, like scraping a car window in winter, moving snow around until the hard clarity of the glass emerges underneath.

tonight I lie with my chest directly in contact with the wooden floor. how often is it that I lie on a hard ground, I think each time, with my cheek pressed against it? I am dimly aware of what other people are doing, but for this moment I retreat inside, because that is where I must start if I would like to to meet others where they are. I am inside, surfacing myself, moving the snow around inside my chest. what gradually starts to emerge in this contact-already, surprisingly, is a kind of anger. a kind of roiling boil, it feels like. at what I am angry it is not immediately clear, but I let it go on, bubbling on the stove, so that it may do what it needs to do.

eventually, as it always does, the sensation starts to shift, the way that buildings fall away in the landscape as you ride in a train leaving the city. all of a sudden, you are elsewhere.

following the sensations yields a series of movements. what I aim to do is to allow the movements to emerge. if I am in tune, listening, then the movements arise out of my body. my role is to support myself in following those movements; neither focusing too little or too much, but allowing, following. this too, a particular form of practice.

these days I recognize about a dozen people present in the studio. how special! mid-movement I look at people and nod, or smile. I am happy to see familiar faces, many whom I have moved with before. each person is here to arrive somewhere, each person holding their particular story. what is their story? I could ask but not with words; I would rather listen the quality of our contact.

together, we all converge onto this particular moment in time and space.

to move with someone is to feel the quality of connection. A person and I move together. she is daring, fierce, moving with a certain quality that feels halfway between desire and abandon, pressing themselves against me. am I seen here, are we in contact, or am I taken as a substrate, simply a body? I am unclear, even as I enjoy the kind of intimacy and contact together that arises through leaning in, through pushing through, sharing weight.

with another person: they are moving, spinning, fluttering. are we dancing together, or not? it is not always clear. I can feel her presence, but I find it pointed elsewhere, into the distance or in the self, so that the I-Thou relationship isn't fully present. I am an arrow pointing at another arrow pointing into the distance. I find myself occasionally off balance, reaching forwards them to maintain contact as they drift away, and return, and I think about the quality of learning, of being off-kilter. vowing to hold my center, I let the distance grow, holding the connection loosely. at some point, they leave unexpectedly, so I transition to dancing with myself. later in the evening, they arrive again in contact, we dance, and then they leave. this happens a few times. hello, I think silently. what's your story?

I find myself wanting slowness, more than anything. what happens when my slowness meets your quickness? someone wants to push me around, to move me, and I find these moments both frustrating and fascinating. can I maintain my energy, or do I want to? at some point moving with two people, one glacial, another one energetic, I wondered if I was a kind of translator, my left arm attuned to stillness, my right arm full of energy and movement. internally, there is a gradient. do I wish to maintain this? I can bring myself to slowness, which surfaces a kind of dissonance with someone who might be moving with a different tempo. what is to be done with dissonance? how much can I move, or do I want to?

with another person: we move slowly, barely touching. eventually, we find a position where his hands and my hands are cupped. energy is flowing, and I can feel it, clearly, my hands tingling. we are still, quiet in the middle of a whirling room. (later he tells me he was doing reiki earlier in the day, and that he was feeling particularly charged; I exclaimed, I could feel it, and he looks at me smiling and kindly but also with a direct look as if to say, of course. why would you be surprised?)

some other movements are flowing. some movements catch me off guard. with some people, we find some beautiful moments of flow, arrive at asymmetrical and unexpected moments of synchrony. I say hello to a familiar face, a familiar face, a familiar face. I dance with a familiar presence. I move around. I arrive into a dense mess of people, merging and flowing together, leaning on each others' bodies, heads on shoulders on backs. my body smells like twenty people’s bodies. gradually, the lights turn off, signaling the end of the evening. the pile of people I have been part of collapses onto the ground, gradually finding a form of rest.

(there is something else I am trying to discover through this writing; some reason that I would spool this out; some quest of discovery through writing that surfaces, elucidates, sees.)

these days, I'm starting to imagine that I can feel the distinction between someone who is moving their body with their mind, and someone who whose body is moving. telling vs listening-doing. (designing vs improvising). if we are both listening then magic might happen. but sometimes I move with someone and I feel their expectations of movement that almost arrives cognitively, linguistically, in so far as there is a grammar, almost, a syntax of communication that seems to me to be a message for how to dance. let's dance this and that a way! If I hold my energy, then dissonance arises. they slow down to match me, as I speed up to match them. do we meet in the middle? within this practice there are languages, and different approaches, I can already tell. am I moving with someone who is deciding what to do? am I moving with someone who is discovering it? I am trying to meet in a register that feels intangible.

in a darkened room in brooklyn, a few dozen shimmering souls engage in a practice that feels eternal. people, moving to music. the music that emerges is always unpredictable. at some point I moved with another partner, finding a rhythm that felt the most clear, strange, balanced, unpredictable, and I noticed the musician's gaze tracking us, observing us, who were dancing to his music. is he playing to our dance? what are we doing? we are in some kind of loop, some ecology, some responsive flocking movement, we are driving and learning and listening and following, in trance, in magic, emerging and finding.

sometimes I want to bring a friend here, and say, "hey, see, look at this magic!" other times I believe I cannot, that this cannot be introduced but only arrived to, and that the people who I meet here are the people who I can move with, like finding fellow hikers on the trail, all with their own journey. I cannot bring a friend to a hiking trail, but I can help a friend become a hiker. is this selfishness?

(in Union Square last fall, an orange-clad religious devotee tells me, as if obvious: if you have something that brings you happiness, wouldn't you want to share it with the world? Jodorowsky in Psychomagic says: what you do not give away, you will also lose.)

or is it that I cannot take responsibility for bringing someone here, that part of the whole task of this practice is to be completely embodied and present and one's self? how to support someone in crafting their own relationship to self-reliance? how to ask for support in crafting my own? where does relation fit into this, of care, of friendship, of responsibility? it is possible to be careless, and it is possible to be over-responsible. how much weight can be given, can be received? what is the space of contact and balance? can I find this here? will contact teach me these lessons?

so much more to learn.

240917

again and again I learn what it means to learn from people. the summer, the fall, this season of lessons. biking through new york today a thought leaps into my mind like a dog jumping into a lake: will I look back onto this time as the years in which my life especially changed? will I be able to see that kind of bend in a life, a continuous montage? or will life always be changing at this rate? meanwhile I whoop and sing as I rattle my bike over potholes, singing to myself out loud, new york, some days you're so beautiful.

in tonight's contact improv class I moved with someone I just met. it's always a little bit of a shock to touch someone else's body, even if that's the frame of the class, even if that's why everyone is present. at some point I stood there, supporting the back of someone's knee, or holding their ribcage between my hands, a sudden kind of intimacy, a sudden acknowledgment of someone's physical reality. people are both soft and hard. the usual invisible spheres of personal space soften and shift momentarily in a space meant for contact. I am silk, we are all silk, I am soft, we are all soft, rolling around on a giant cushion the size of the room, drifting loose and open.

before I had thought that contact was about listening to myself and the other simultaneously, and I still think that's true, but in today's and last week's movement what I started to perceive was the abstract space created together, as if a spherical form, a tangible blob of movement. I could tell that my movement partner, S, was hesitant, so I drifted away, moving briefly with E, feeling what it's like to improvise with him. am I still silk, I asked, and I was, even though it felt like something between us juddered and shuddered a bit, whether him or me, I was still silk, I held, and moved in the way that allows movements to spool out. I can still be silk, and I felt within me the insistence in wanting to hold this way of movement. I might have called this stubbornness in the past, but now it feels more like rootedness, the way a plant getting repotted refuses to move from the earth, or the way that the bathwater tries gently to tug you back into the tub as you finally stand up. a kind of certainty, loosely held, gentle insistence: I will be silk. so I was, and so with E it kind of worked, but then I found myself colliding with S again, and E with someone else, and so it went.

in the movement with S I found a kind of tentative creation starting to blossom. what I imagined is a kind of shared bubble. inside of that bubble I was trying to be in half of it, but also trying to grow the bubble, too. giving space while also expanding the space. at some point during a weight-sharing exercise she commented quietly, 'you don't have to be so careful; you can give me more', so I tried pouring in my weight gradually, albeit with some hesitation.

when do you ask for others to hold your weight? what is the pace at which you trust that others can hold it? to be with people is to hold parts of them, and meet those parts gently. sometimes, to live with people asks us to release those parts gently down onto the ground, as if lowering a heavy vase, softly but clearly, without any sudden drops that might create a crack. watch your fingers, move it slow. pouring something you were holding onto the ground, with care.

so, the question is: pouringly, can I trust you to hold my weight? and I experimented with this, giving more of my weight, sometimes from my head to her shoulder, my arm to her leg, sometimes fully leaning, feeling the stability of her body rock a little, and then settle into further stability as she leans back into me to provide structure.

on my first real architecture project ever I went onto the roof of the two buildings we were renovating. J, the architect of record, walked into the middle of the roof, stood with her feet next to each other, raised her heels, and then dropped them onto the ground, sending a singular shockwave reverberating across the roof. the roof, undulating. this, to her, was a measurement, a heuristic to gauge the stability of the roof. materials always deflect under load. the question is not of their deflection but of the amount. max deflection is sometimes understood as a percentage of the dimension of the span itself. other times, you can do the calculations or look this up in a table. there are no hard and fast rules, but heuristics, rules of thumb. your two-by-four is sagging more than an inch with a six foot span. this roof feels like it's reverberating too much; we must not be so stable.

or: this, feels, fine.

sometimes I do this foot-fall gesture too, and imagine a ripple spreading out from me. can I trust you to hold my weight, I ask the ground, and of people. how much are you deflecting? given what we’re trying to span, what’s too much?

S and I switch roles, even though I have the nagging feeling that I haven't quite fully given her all of my weight. no matter, though; that's not the exercise. on her turn this time she is nimble, willing, enthusiastic, in a spirit that makes her seem freer and wholehearted. fully leaning, fully offering her weight. in the gender and/or body size dynamics that exist between a man and a woman there are inevitably norms or default expectations around giving and receiving weight in contact improv, at least initially; I am much more comfortable giving more weight to someone larger or male than not. part of me hopes that further explorations into contact improv would loosen these norms, and it occurs to me that perhaps one of the side practices of contact improvisation is the practice of seeing and working with/against these norms in the first place.

afterwards, S and I move freeform, in contact. I consider the blob of space. I am trying to be in half of it, and finding my freedom with it, holding my silk-like nature, continuing to be in that particular half-trance state that contact improv both asks and allows from me. together, we move for a moment in a way that feels flowing, holding, playful, sincere, intimate, and also: half, half. it is late september, it is soho, and it is a full moon, the evening of 추석. I am grateful for this encounter, this possibility, this practice.

later, after saying my goodbyes and leaving the studio, I walk across broadway, soho, in that particular late-summer early-autumn weather, and think, I hope this practice continues in me, this practice that brings me life. I hope these are the months and years in which the trajectories of my life change, the way you can see someone morph, loosen, harden. do you know what I mean? we are still like taffy, somewhere between earth and water, made of stuff that gradually adapts to our environments. over the course of years you see this change, for example, with friends who you haven't seen in years. the course of their lives shape them, and you notice the way they speak, or carry themselves has been shaped, too. people drift apart, or together, partially because of tectonic shifts, but also because we're all in these different flows and spaces, continuously being shaped and formed, even (or especially) at these ages. who will we continue to become? how will our forms continue to form?

the eternal questions asked by so many others before me. only one way to find out!

240912

what is a protocol? an agreement between you and me on how to communicate. TCP: handshake with me first, and then we can talk. or, UDP: send things into the ether, blindly, and whoever will listen will listen. some protocols can adjust the level of clarity; in MQTT, you can rotate a knob from, “make sure he hears this once and only once” to “just shout it out loud, a voice yelling into the wind. who cares who listens? what’s important is that we have broadcasted.”

how do you agree on how to agree? this is always the hardest part in a loose collective, I’ve found. how should we make a decision on how we make decisions? unanimously, consensus, modified consensus, quorum, majority, supermajority? silence ensues. for a long time I thought that this was some kind of axiomatic bind, some core unstable quandary upon which the group is formed. now I realize that the ultimate decider isn’t the protocol, it’s the vibes, the soup of social relations and energetic flow that is sensible. it is both tough and fragile, woven out of gossamer-thin threads of intuition, densely packed with the exponential number of connections in a group (n * (n-1)). I imagine that the Tao Te Ching would say, it can not be controlled, or it will control you; instead, it is something one can participate inside of, to flow in and out of.

—

if the personal is political, the political is also personal. perhaps the question is: how might we internalize geopolitical events in our lives? perhaps the questions we should ask are:

have I enslaved another part of myself, trying to make it work for the other parts that control it?

have I staged a coup to free one part of myself, eventually for that part to become another dictator?

have I colonized another part of myself?

do I have an internal class or caste system, where part of myself exploits the other parts of myself, alienating it from the fruits of its labor?

am I engaged in a civil war, where I’m hoping the good parts of myself kills and wins over the bad parts?

and:

If my own internal earth, my world, my internal global systems do not have peace, what makes me so sure that my external actions (in the name of politics) will create peace? should peace not emerge from a peaceful place?

it’s not that the ends could or could not justify the means, it’s that the means create the ends, because the means is the present, and so the present creates the future.

240903

and now? I am out of that city. let me write this down as a testament to remember.

something burbles underneath my fingers. this is the time I must take to allow it to emerge. I operate on a hunch to surface what must be surfaced. drawing this out is the task of knowing myself, and to also share it, simultaneously. what emerges? what might?

twenty four hours ago I was in the desert, during a whiteout, watching the temple fall. / I am filled with an indescribable emotion. I am burbling and roiling and feeling strange inside. / I am sitting on a sidewalk on amsterdam ave eating the world's best falafel. / I love this city, but also long for the desert.

(none of these words are adequate. what is it? what am I trying to get at?

if I were to try I would take delicate fingers and plunge them into my chest, draw out some shimmering substance, gently, directly, spooling it out into the air. what is in me, I ask, what is already in me? what is this feeling inside of me already that persists? it directs me towards a longing, a desiring, a missing. I am skeptical and suspicious of it, which means that I am scared of it; I am rendered possibly weak, hurt-able, vulnerable. I am at risk of heartbreak, I think, which is a sign that I am open to the possibility of being open, truly the soft body of my animal loving what it loves, doing what it does.

but what is this?

the sensation that there is something inside of me also reifies a certain kind of certainty, a clarity, a clarity of direction. I am sitting here on this new york street feeling as comfortable as can be. is there anywhere else like this city? but still, relentlessly, something else calls. where are the places I can touch my own life, I think, where the presence of mind is there for me to hold it in the palm of my own hand, an impossible task, my life touching itself, always incomplete, like lifting myself up with my bootstraps. yet still i try. jump high enough and I might, for a moment, be able to grasp myself with my hand, to encircle my life with a hand for a moment to softly feel into the contours of it. ah, here it is. ah, this is what I might do. ah, this is its shape. ah, this is what it is made out of.

if I am to imagine holding it it is both soft and prickly somehow, a porcupine nuzzling into my palm, yet aimed towards a certain direction. 'you know what you want to do', it whispers, and I get scared, terrified, terrified enough to try to find a collaborator to do this task together. maybe if I'm alone it will be easier, I have thought, but I now think that's a shorthand, a shortcut, a fantasy solution to the inevitable and necessary (and thus joyous) task of placing one foot after another. the intuition already knows.

onwards!

240901

(written in Camp Contact, Black Rock City, 2024)

Sitting in my tent the night before I leave I am filled with a sudden longing, a kind of preemptive homesickness. I will miss this place, I know, this home, these people. It will slip away as a moment in time, like all moments do, a collection of faces and encounters and experiences that have so lovingly and richly shaped my experience here. A dense stew.

I am pulled in so many directions: towards myself, towards others. I am joyous. M says that my positivity is infectious. Here? yes! I find myself moving, breaking out into song, working, exploring, crying, laughing. I get hurt, feel around the edges of a soft heartbreak. I find again and again what it means to care, and to still make mistakes. I hear stories, oceans of teeming life that I see from the shore. I get to meet people, and to really look at them in the eye, and to be really present and open together.

This week I tried to show this place to someone, and I think I utterly failed, because I wasn’t even looking at it the proper way, or rather, I wasn’t seeing how I was actually living it. Burning Man isn’t a festival, or even an event: it’s a form of hypercondensed life, in which I have lived months, maybe years. Inside of this last ten days a lifetime’s worth of events have happened. Inside of this I find the space for surrender, worship, devotion, ecstatic exploration, challenge, grief, and sorrow. All of these words dangle on a page hoping you might understand, but I know you won’t. All I dream for is to sit in deep playa during sunset with the people I care about the most and to talk about our lives - what constitutes it, what’s inside of it, what shapes it takes. Do you see? Shall we see it together?

I don’t know what coils inside of me. Inside of this tent I am filled with longing. Underneath this city is the desert, and as people leave the city, burning man gradually dissolves into its original form, a desert, with all of the desolateness highlighted. What makes this place is nothing other than people.

I love this place; this place that has shaped me, that started to change my life nine years ago, that transformed who I am and how I might see this world. This place that gives me faith in people, that allows me to find places inside of myself that I have yet to understand, that allows so much for me, as difficult and painful as it can also be.

My words are inadequate. I am a vibrating string. I am a yearning bow. I am holding the possibilities of another world. I am seeing the ways in which we might be new to each other. I am hope and freedom and ease. I am already me.

240821

BQE, southbound exit 34. The exit is often packed, with dozens of cars stretching upstream waiting in line. You wait, you inch forward, you wait.

The exit is designed such with a wide offramp that it's possible for cars to drive past the dozens of cars and squeeze in at the last moment, cutting the line by ten, maybe even twenty minutes. You wait, you inch forward, you wait, and then a car shamelessly zooms to your side, sliming in to try to squeeze in ahead of you.

As such, this presents a kind of moral concern. What do you do? Do you skip the line, or do you wait in line? Moreover, what is your attitude towards someone who tries to squeeze in? Do you get angry, indignant about people who seem to try to prioritize their individual needs over the social contract of the road? Do you let it go, assuming the best of each person, making up some hypothetical emergency that necessitates each person breaking some rules in order to go head? Do you let it pass, finding meaning only in the practice of one's self, without deep regard to what others might do or not?

Yesterday I overheard, by chance, two people talking about this conversation. "Someone should write an essay on that exit", one of them said, repeatedly, as if trying to articulate something that I couldn't quite see.

And then they said: "I usually skip ahead, because I realize that my shame at skipping ahead is far less difficult than the frustration I have when I wait in line."

All day, I'm finding that I can't get this out of my mind. I have this image of someone weighing these two internal emotional forces: the force of shame, and the force of frustration. Having balanced the two, frustration was more difficult, harder to hold, and so they prioritized the relief of this frustration. So simple, yet so flawed, I think, or at least, I realize how much disappointment and anger I hold towards this approach -- which is, I think, a paradigmatic kind of approach one sees in a world where moral or ethical frameworks have become hollowed out and have been replaced with political ideology, identity, and emotion.

Someone says: I have emotions, and some of them are hard. I hold the kleshas of aversion, craving, ignorance. I don't want the bad emotions; I want the good emotions. Skipping the line minimizes the bad emotions. Doing this other thing maximizes the good emotions. With more good emotions, I will be happy and good.

I don't want to live this way.

last year, around this time, I wrote:

the emotions have been helpful in understanding my capacity. what am I okay with? how do I feel about this? what I realize is that the emotions cannot tell me where to go, but how I am resourced to go, channeling the wisdom of the self into a felt sense that warns or empowers me onwards.

the intellect has been helpful in understanding strategy. what should I be prepared with? Which route should I take? The intellect, too, can’t tell me where to go, but can advise me on what I need, what gear I might take, road conditions, weather conditions. Listening to the intellect too much makes me spin in fascinating circles around possibility and limitation, opportunity and scarcity. “We could”, it says endlessly. Listening to the intellect too little makes me rush a little foolhardly into situations. But by and by.. it’s time to take the intellect’s megaphone away and replace it with a small lapel mic.

Listening to the emotions too little makes me overextend myself. I become a distended balloon, temporarily inflated, and will later make wheezing or wailing sounds when I deflate, the emotions I haven’t felt into manifesting all over, time-delayed by hours, days, even weeks and months. One relationship I started mourning a year later. So it goes. And listening to the emotions too much; well, there’s a distinction between listening and following. It’s important to listen fully, to notice fully the emotions that are present; that way, they are accounted for, available, understood, recognized, loved. But to follow them too much is to be swept up by the logic of the storm; the storm is when hot air current meets cold air current, and suddenly emerges, torrent and gale, so very present, and will also die out and dissipate into nothing, later. The emotion will pass, if given due recognition, but to follow it closely is to live a life like a torrent; unpredictable, chaotic, dangerous, but of course, vivid, beautiful, special. This too is part of nature, and so is change, injury, loss, death, grief. And in so far as we are part of nature, it’s also in our nature to resist, or to avoid, and to find safety as much as possible. To follow an emotion is to become a force of nature; beautiful and unsafe. Ultimately, the nature swallows you up. You are in the throes of the storm. To become powerful nature is a terrible curse. To be human is to live a humble, beautiful life. And fortunately, humans have been living with storms, both real and emotional, for millennia. There are ways to live that we can learn if we learn from each other; follow some paths that others have gone.

And listening to the spirit? The soul? Well; to listen is to be alive.

—

I think this is why I have been gradually indexing away from pleasure or happiness or joy, and more towards beauty. Beauty is the radiance of the whole. With beauty, I am not avoiding sorrow or disappointment.

The compassionate response I could have towards that person I eavesdropped on would be to recognize that this is someone who has been in the throes of their storm. Without a surfboard, a raft, a boat, to live with emotion is to be buffeted around by its intensities. Climb onto the invisible deck above and look down on it for a moment, before diving back in. I am lucky to be where I am, in this moment of time, that I can even say such things. I am grateful.

230815

these days, when someone asks me how things are going, I say that they are vibrant, or dense. this end of summer is a ripe fruit bitten into, juice running down the fleshy inside of your arm. intensities, possibilities, depths. can life be like this? how can life be like this, I wonder.

so many snippets in the past few weeks that I struggle to grasp them all. I try to journal, but how can I? I am attempting to reel up the ocean of experience with my fishing net, the only evidence of possibility the taste of briny sea left crystallizing on the net itself.

do you think in ideas? do you think in chains of logic knitted together, this word pushing forth into that word? is your mind an inference machine, stacking together concept to concept to concept, so that alas, you might arrive at one more concept? and what do you do with that concept? does it hold water, or a love, or a life?

reading what I wrote I see how words fail; I see that what I am inevitably trying to do is to describe the finger pointing at the moon.

what is clear to me:

most of the work is energetic. by energetic I mean: about the realms of experience, around 'energy', a helpful term to amass a gendlin felt sense, experience, gut, perception, emotions, feeling, together into on synthesized term that emerges from you, listening to your body. 'energy' is a term at a particular abstraction layer, not needed to be 'proven with quantum physics', but rather something that is perhaps wrong-but-helpful, the way that files don't exist "inside" zoolander's computer.

the thing about 'energy' is that it is experiential, in the here-and-now. the concept lives somewhere far away, somewhere in the realm of correction, alignment, modification. the experiential and the here-and-now is in the body. the body tells us what it needs. the body is the fount of life, and death.

(I am trying to write about something underneath words. please don't read these words. please squint to see what I am searching to touch, beneath.)

the problem asking people or one's self, "what do you want", is that it triggers a cognitive process. things enter the realm of symbolic logic, gigantic linked lists or graphs with chains of association spidering out all across your brain. "do I dare to eat a peach?", you think, and a million connections spider out, not at the neural level but at the symbolic level; what peach might symbolize, its nutritional value, the time it is, how much it might cost. these chains of symbolic signification keep on spidering out until they try to touch reality. in crypto-land they call the 'oracle' to be the interface between crypto logic and the real world. if I make a decision about eating a peach based on its caloric value, where is the oracle that translates between calories and my body? does it even exist? or am I operating on a 2000 calorie daily budget that remains in the symbolic, as abstracted as the financial markets are from use-value, drifting from its referent?

at the other end of this is your body, my body, and how it might be hungry. am I hungry, writing this?

(I am hungry.)

the experiment is try to live according to the body. this does not mean living according to pleasure, but to use the body as a barometer for desire. the body knows, first; to notice how it feels around whom, the shape it takes, the tightnesses and loosenesses in body that move around as we go about our day, engage in our tasks, and talk to people.

230810

Waiting for a friend on a Saturday evening, August, New York City, Columbus Circle, suddenly my heart swells for this city full of people and people and people, knowing that, at some level, you have to like people in order to live here, a city full of people who like people.

230806

one of the key problems with social media is that it is primarily a platform for stating and imaging. not stories. no narratives, no complex events, no tales that are strange enough to be real, not long enough to get knotted. these simple valences do not suffice. how do you meander inside of a narrative, a life? how much do you know the intricacies of a human life?

what we absorb trains us. gradually, a generation and a world is getting trained on a culture of momentary flashes, snippets, images, statements. if you can only see a bead, how do you see the necklace, let alone the knots in the necklace, let alone indra's net?

are these words, too, a statement? yes. there are stories underneath this statement. once upon a time, I should say, and launch into a story...

240805

by calling it art, it might be shared
by calling it ritual, it might be consecrated
by calling it practice, it might be practiced

240801

the thing is: writing, this kind of writing, is meant to be a kind of freedom, a space in which to discover and to explore. perhaps the fact that this can be read is both incidental and necessary; the moment I write, I step outside of myself and join you, the reader, us all together in looking back upon an experience, a constellation of happenings, a kind of a life. what is, what gives, what has happened, what might happen?

I don't know. I do know. are these things not precious? is this thing not precious? I meander around looking for this kind of gaze. it's both always present but sometimes cloudy, within myself of course, and others. to exist is to occasionally hold this diaphanous self up to the sky, a thin slice of radish, to see how transparent it might be between forefinger and thumb, ethereal and substantial at the same time. do you know? do you know what I aim to say?

there are logics you can subscribe to, ways of being we can hold onto. what is a life? what is a life worth? I am saying it too rawly again, like getting naked too fast too quick, suddenly just confronting the nature of a body, in too bright of daylight. maybe the room has to be darker. like tanizaki, in praise of shadows, maybe it's the necessity of occlusion, of telling the truth but slant, of dancing around a phrase, of not wanting to talk about it directly, lest something disappears, lest the magic of what we are wanting to do slides away, because it does. maybe what we want to do in this romance with ourselves is not directly ask the self, "is this a date" or "would I like to kiss myself" but rather to let ourselves get used to ourselves, to hover around, to find ourselves taking ourselves on a solo walk, realizing that, actually, I have something to say to myself; I've been waiting for this moment, feeling the weight of particular moments settle in, as if the air makes a particular noise, the scope and size of the world changing, almost. maybe it's like that, to practice a kind of living, or loving, of settling, of reaching, of looking out, far.

do you know what I mean? does any of this make sense?

I am truly trying to hover around what is central. I am scribbling continuously, live drawing, five minutes to capture a nakedly pure body onto paper, my hand moving charcoal or pencil, hoping that the cascade of gestures and words will together surface a shape that emerges from it all, no single phrase taken seriously, but the accumulation of it all, the gestalt, allowing contours to be seen. does that make sense?

(these days I find myself saying "does that make sense" or "that makes sense" often, and I wonder what that mean, what not making sense might even mean, and I idly wonder if I'm over-valorizing the idea of 'making sense', but I still say it, because "making sense" makes sense to me, and in that I mean that I have seen a reality, witnessed someone's reality for a moment, and can perceive it, say hello, I have arrived to where you are I think, I am outside your door, I am here, it makes sense, and in many cases it seems like there is not much more to do than to announce that I am here, with you, in seeing what you might see. yes, that is how it is. yes, that is how it felt. the reality, the truth of it is present. together, we might see. there, it is. that is how it was. yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

said in other words: what I value lately is this notion of seeing the reality of things, I think, directly, to look at it with discernment and clarity. it happened the way it happened, and before I might rush to any kind of evaluation or response, to say that it happened, or that it is happening. somehow, in standing still, that is enough, to see it in its whole, neither neutral nor enmeshed, but equanimous, hopefully. here it is. that is what it happened. do you see? do you see? a witness.

at once utterly obvious and always-not-quite attainable.

does that make sense?)

yesterday I had probably the most singular collaborative experience of my life, at a contact improv jam. I don't know how much I could say except that inside of me the feeling of freedom and collaboration were perfectly balanced; I was doing precisely and only what I wanted, and I was also listening fully and collaborating fully, and the gestures that were emerging between us, between me and him were erupting out, clearly coming from a place beyond understanding, from some other place. I lost my sense of time, or a sense of my surroundings, and all that was present was the gestures of movement, the forms of dance, the practice that emerged, both of our meditative trances, a sense of focusing, of listening, of finding, of allowing, of emerging. together we were creating a space, a zone, an energetic field, our hands moving around each other but never touching, and circulating a space inside of which movement and deep connection was present without any form of physical contact.

for a moment it felt like the outer world darkened, he and I both disappeared and reappeared, and if the parts of myself that disappeared were the parts that were thinking, aiming, and some shimmering spark inside was connected to my hands, my feet, my body, some kind of glowing flow that was present. all I had to do was to be, and to be was to listen and to move, and to follow what felt right, and somehow through it all the movement emerged. at two points I noticed that I was sweating profusely from my forehead, enough that it was dropping out onto the ground, and in the back of my mind while moving I thought, yes, something is truly happening here, and I felt somehow further validated, as if this transformation or this altered state was itself the product of a kind of effort, that what was happening was not exactly effortlessness or 'doing whatever I want', not in a limp or chaotic way, but rather like tuning into the wind, a combination of alertness and relaxedness, like sitting on the cushion, skimming the surface of something, a kind of momentary coherence without mimicry, of alignment without synchronicity.

I did not realize something like this was possible with another person.

what can I say about this further? maybe what was deeply validating afterwards was the felt sense of my own interior landscape, and the quality of internal movements that were necessary to arrive at a particular point in the landscape, and the fact that it was clear my movement partner had their own internal movements, their own self-well that they were drawing from, and that perhaps our wells were similar, or maybe that the way in which we were drinking from them were similar, so that the movement that emerged was in the same wavelength, different sounds playing on the same radio frequency.

does this make sense?

( I am thinking about how, through meditation, I am more and more learning the ways in which it's possible to amplify or shift one's focus and attention onto different sensations, and shape them. like tuning a radio, almost, tuning into particular sensations or ways of being. these ways of being are foundational ways of existing in the world. and there are many lineages of methods and practices for doing this, I know, but for some reason it feels important to figure this out myself, that I'm prioritizing trying to find the 'answers' but to enjoy the experiment itself, the process of learning from my own experience, and I wonder sometimes if I'm not being overly 'slow' or stubborn to reinvent the wheel, but then I also remind myself that this is (in many ways) how I've always been, dissatisfied with learning pre-existing answers unless I come up with the process myself, wanting to figure it out myself, or make it myself. so here I am, occasionally reading hints, but trying to find my own path up and around the mountain range, as idiosyncratic as it might be.)

this is all to say that in our movement together I felt myself buzzing, felt the particular kind of loose focus, the letting-go-and-focusing-at-the-same-time. I was present and focused but not grasping, listening but not following, and somehow my hands and arms and torso and legs knew what to do, or rather they didn't know what to do, it was already there and I was spooling it out or learning from it, like watching the river and learning that a red leaf is floating by, and also doing: doing without trying, just letting, allowing while also listening, letting it emerge, emerge, emerge.

all in all, in this summer, life is dense and beautiful. I hold snippets of moments in my memory, and hope they will persist, and also allow them to fall through my fingers, knowing and hoping that my body will remember.

240727

There is always a story.

240724

is it enough to have changed a life by a tiny amount, I ask, laughing to myself.

240717

Putting down the map of thought, dancing in the territory of experience.

Recently I talked to someone who excitedly recounted their experience sitting in front of a fire for the first time. Their friend had invited them to the outdoors, to sit in front of a fire for a few hours. "Sitting in front of a fire for a few hours? What could be fun about this? I thought about it, and I didn't think it would be interesting." And of course, they went there, experienced fire itself, and sat there for hours, mesmerized, finding something in the flickering flames, and came back to speak with wonder about what fire can do, or what it actually is.

This week I keep on thinking of that phrase: I thought about it, and what that can do, or rather, what it cannot do, what things it forecloses, a certain kind of logical thinking, a certain kind of thought that operates because you create a mental model of how the world works. The mental model operates as a replication of the world. Much energy is spent maintaining this simulation, this model, and finding as close as possible an adherence to this model and the world itself. The benefits of maintaining a tightly coupled model is that one can simulate the future, to foresee outcomes, to project what might happen. It seems to offer the ability to be unsurprised by the unexpected, to modulate one's relationship to uncertainty. I am tempted to say that this is about a fear of loss, discomfort, pain, tragedy, misfortune, suffering. A form of aversion in of itself.

Somehow I find a lot of time noticing what I'm thinking about, or what place this kind of modeling-thought operates in my mind. Do I know the world, really?

A friend is making an installation for Burning Man, a tree, that requires bent pipes cantilevered out from a large flange that will then be lag-screwed into the playa. He asks me questions like: 'will this bend, or tip over?' I find myself unsure how to answer these questions, because there are many different voices inside of me, all saying something different. The architect in me crafts a 3d model, and squints to see what my intuition says. Will this tip over? But my intuition is of course some kind of a physical intuition, a gut feeling, based on what I've seen in the world before, my body having leaned against stable and unstable things, the memory of touching an aluminum pole, of bending EMT conduit, my tight-gripped hands remembering how rigid pieces became when they were welded together. Isn't the memory in my body soaring up to synthesize an answer?

And then there's the model, physics, of course, some rudimentary calculations I can do around force, the average weight of a human body, the length of cantilever, the leverage created, the force exerted onto these lag screws. I could model this out, use some calculations, add a safety factor. The safety factor, too, feeling like a formalized "this ought to work", a structured way to squint at it and say "let's make it three times as stronger, for good measure." For good measure.

In the end I say what I am most alive to these days, which is that I tell him: I don't know. Get the actual stuff, and actually try it out. The only way to know is to actually try, I say, which I think is both truthful, but reveals a kind of mistrust of models and measurements I hold these days, of experience in the world translated into symbolic language and logic and re-translated back into action. It's a partial answer, I know. But I love the idea of no-measurement processes in woodworking; getting the center of an object without measurement, translating the location of screw holes without a ruler. In a 'construction hack' video, someone rubs chalk on the edges of an outlet box, then bangs a sheet of drywall against the box, which means that the outlines of the outlet box is transferred to the back of the drywall, which can then be cut out for a perfect opening for the outlet. Instead of measurement, the box marked its own location, indexically.

Instead of world -> measurement -> mark -> measurement -> world

there is

world -> world,

from the world to the world, from experience to experience, immanence to immanence.

in a contact improv jam this week I find so many more questions. I have gotten to the point where some movements in my body seem to emerge without me truly having to understand them. it is not so much that I am doing the moving, but allowing the movements already present to bubble out, like a burp making its way up and out of the body: a function of intentional relaxation more than strained effort. movements find their way out of my body, sometimes, and I am here to let them do what they need to do. I waver in and out of semi-trance, it occasionally collapsing from a self-consciousness, then gliding back in as I attempt to forget, forget the name of what I am doing.

in meeting people I wonder. are we dancing, or moving, or finding? am I truly listening to them, or am I meeting them as foils for the dance I wish to dance? am I waiting, allowing space, supporting, or am I actually not creating enough of a space for movement because I am not leaning into the center that might be created if I leaned in?

are we moving while keeping their center in mind? are we moving while keeping our center in mind?

and what about the third thing that emerges, in the in-between?

240711

sitting in Zuccotti Park in the area that used to be the People's Library, I am eating a salad, when I suddenly realize how tall the trees have become. a gothic canopy, the original cathedral. an enclosure, formed.

thirteen years ago, at occupy wall st, they were still young, still barely planted

(insert here, a series of memories that cannot be described, or rather, are gossamer-thin, too fragile to expose to sunlight, must be held delicately; they exist as a series of flashes, images, the people's mic, of a march, chants reverberating through the streets, the sense of abundance and possibility and generosity and solidarity, a kind of imagination that seemed to crack open the world)

and so I am glad that these trees have grown: witnesses to what was present.

240707

"Boehme has a note before one of his books, in which he asks the reader not to go farther and read the book unless he is willing to make practical changes as a result of the reading. Otherwise, Boehme says, reading the book will be bad for him, dangerous. We have the sense that Wallace Stevens’s relation to the shadow followed a pattern that has since become familiar among American artists: he brings the shadow into his art, but makes no changes in the way he lives. The European artists—at least Yeats, Tolstoy, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rilke—seem to understand better that the shadow has to be lived too, as well as accepted in the work of art. The implication of all their art is that each time a man or woman succeeds in making a line so rich and alive with the senses, as full of darkness as:

quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries

he must from then on live differently."

Robert Bly , A Little Book on the Human Shadow.

"Q: You usually say, 'What you give, you give to yourself; what you do not give, you give up.'

A: And this is to say that whatever you do in the world, you do to your self; and whatever you do not give to the world, you lose."

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic

240704

the desire for these ephemeral moments to be witnessed.

"I was there, too, like this, doing that."
"This happened."
"It ran through my fingers."
"You had to be there."
"I ate it all up."

afterwards: "what you see are the crumbs on an empty plate", I might say. "the moment has passed. I am one with what I have consumed. by encountering the event I can no longer show it to you. in living, I have drifted away from the image. I am sorry. next time, let's eat this together. of course, next time, we will not be thinking about the empty plate, but how full our bellies are. this did happen. it will slip away in our memory, as it already is in mine. where did it go?"

I could continue: "either I am geological strata, deposit, aggregate, an eternal archive. or I am river, always anew. where is the past? what is my relationship to loss, and ephemerality, and thus, death? as I continue this process of continuously growing older, these are the eternal questions that are gradually emerging, far or near in the distance, nebulous but certain, like the way the landscape morphs when you're on a highway, one's speed allowing a kind of shape to form, such as when you approach a city, the way that it rises, emerges from the ground, suddenly present."

as I speak my eyes soften, because I am remembering too many moments of arrival and departure, because I am attempting to pour these reminisces into words, hoping that they will set and harden, hoping to get this across, to you.

240703

what lies in this speech? what is being said? what can you say, here?

growing up in Korea, I lamented 존댓말, 반말, the endless hierarchies of language that seemed to govern and shape the hierarchies between each other--

(I write the above, and wince. who am I writing for; some hypothetical reader that doesn't know this? I am writing to discover, to unfold, to discover a home in the writing, as Carl Philips says. let me start again, get straight to the heart of it:)

it turns out that hierarchies and intimacies are intricately connected; intimacy gradients, levels of entry, entering and leaving. 반말, 존댓말. 야, 너, 그래, 그래요, 그랬어요. 말을 내려놓는 것이 / 가능하다는 것은 / 가까워진다는 것이 / 가능해진다는 것. to negotiate the space of in-between is to craft the kinds of closenesses we might have. where are you, where am I, how do we settle? if language is a house, Korean feels like a large house full of many different types of rooms, all with their different functions, the parlor, the dining room, the kitchen, the office, the conference room, the 마당..

(what am I trying to say, here, using english primarily? what is this language I hold in my right hand?)

leaving contact improv tonight I wondered if I shouldn't try to get dinner with some of the people that I've met. it could be possible, I knew, the space of coexistence afterwards is trembling, waiting for a coagulation point to emerge, like supercooled water suddenly crystalizing into ice, or the 핫팩 with button-snap, watching it crystallize and engage in its exothermic reaction. 'want to get dinner?', propagates through a group, and then suddenly you're rolling 3, 5, 10 people deep at a restaurant. it could be possible, I thought, pulling on my shoes, saying bye, walking down into a beautiful soho street.

and then why? what would I be seeking? what am I seeking in a meeting with another person? it is in fact their own interiority that I want to say hello to, mine and theirs, mine and yours. spoken language is not always the domains in which this is possible, for understandable reasons; it is overloaded; there are social niceties and phatic speech and sleights of hand that allow the conversation to flow, like a game, tossed in the air and maintained. keep the ball rolling, popping, each conversation a bit of a balancing act, making sure that the ball doesn't land on the ground, in which case, something might happen; a silence, a settling-into, a dawning realization. god forbid, we might become present.

the primary question is: am I there? how much time do I spend there? how much time do you? and can we get there, together?

I feel urged to say something about 'boundaries' and 'vulnerability' but these words, too, seem quite meaningless, made-up words, as made up as 'riverbank' and 'estuary' or 'butte' and 'wash' are, wrong-but-helpful words that are abstracted layers on top of the way that water naturally flows through a landscape. the water does what it does, you see, and the words are like dashed lines around a phenomenon, a shared pattern, a kind of filter, a way to see the world, for a moment, with patterns. the risk is that the words start to dominate, and one might being to believe that the world is full of 'rivers' and 'riverbanks' and 'rocks' and 'sand', as opposed to the unnameable things they actually are made out of. names are helpful, sure, in that they allow us to point, and to look together, like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. but what about the moon?

what more is to be done in language, I wonder? and as I think this I also know that I am not altogether right, or that there are more answers to be found, actually, that I do not hold my answers yet. I am crossing Broadway, turning my head left and right to look down this long avenue, soaking in the new york melancholy that only a midsummer evening can provide, this sense of simultaneous timelessness and ephemerality, the sense that you are standing in a way that millions of others and past selves have. how many times have I walked this block, or that block? I was twenty, or twenty five, or thirty two..

more than anything I think: the space to meet is inside the space of movement, of bodies. perhaps this is why, at least for now, I am finding that space inside of movement, of contact. already I am meeting you in that in-between. already we are saying hello, finding what might already emerge in the inbetween. already there is a sense of exchange that is emerging. there is no dominating syntax or structure, like a language that has only a hundred words to describe the world. everything is either this, or that. with fewer words the pre-existing limitations of language become clear. it's not so much that language is to be jettisoned, but more rather, that the plunge into water is necessary.

sometimes I leave a conversation wondering why I did not go there, myself, as well. is it possible? it is, but something intangible has to be present. an appreciation of silence, perhaps. or more than that -- a shared recognition that the goal of conversation is, perhaps, beyond talking to each other. is there not something else to be had, here? are we not shepherding and allowing parts of ourselves to meet?

what I am trying to say is that perhaps I have always had the axis of 반말 or 존댓말 inside of me, and through it, words attempt to emerge, in english. perhaps the presence of this axis indicates the possibilities of its traversal. if the axis is vertical, like how hierarchies are conceptualized, higher vs. lower, then its verticality implies a depth; to go lower than low is to dig. this axis is a shovel, a drill, and I descend closer to the ground, begin entering subterranean space. this is the space for conversation, I could say. would you like to orbit the earth, wearing our cosmonaut suits? or would you like to plunge into the ocean, meet some magma, touch our geological layers?

240630

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

240623

it is probably that the most meaningful work is also the most common and unique simultaneously;

if meaning is considered rare, in that it is a limited resource, like gold, then it exists only in particular moments: a geological vein, a mountaintop, a particular niche, a group of people. it is difficult to find because it is rare, the thought goes. a perception of limitedness lends itself to an adoption of scarcity logics or market logics, a macroeconomics of value, of a demand curves intersecting with inelastic supply, settling on momentary equilibria that tells you how pricey this thing might be. "out there, there are rare meanings to be discovered. we can bring it back and sell it for a high price".

if meaning is considered common-and-unique, like a wildflower, or a human being, then it is plentiful. plentifulness, which is a characteristic of being-more-present in the world, is misunderstood as being fungible, a market-oriented understanding that allows unique objects to become interchangeable, part of a supply.

(Fuji apples are $1.99 a pound, a sign says, but what are ‘apples’? I’ve only known one apple at a time.)

is my body precious, not because of how it distinguishes itself from the many other bodies that are out there, but because of what it already is? To believe in the body is to believe in everybody’s body; to find the gleaming jewel within is to understand what how everyone also carries it.

The alternative is: 'I am special because you are not', which means that I cross a chasm and lose sight of myself, put a part of me into the bag of one’s shadow, as Robert Bly calls it, and dote over the part that's left. Part of the self becomes worthless, and part of the self becomes valuable. And because my self is not fully valuable, neither is yours. What is at stake with a care for the body is a fractal-like practice of care for the world. Is not the way I treat you also the way I treat all of me, and vice versa? Are we not already holding galaxies, our internal family systems, internal societal systems, internal earth systems? What are the geopolitics of your internal earth? How are we going to deal with our own climate changes? Our own ecosystems, collapsing? Our own deaths?

—

reading what I have just written I feel painfully the chasm between writing and meaning, and perhaps, the ways in which writing can always fail. how to say what needs to be said with these blunt tools? words, like lumber, irregular and misshapen, ultimately immanent in the world. I place words at angles on the ground, angled so that the implied point of their intersection is impossibly sharp because it is invisible, precise because it cannot be seen.

the task these above words are attempting is not about claiming these thoughts out loud as truths, but attempting to utter these statements as a form of recognition: the impossible and crucial task of remembering the color of the ocean on this day, or the sound of X’s laughter on that day.

—

As Stanley Kunitz says in his poem “Touch Me”: “What makes the engine go? /Desire, desire, desire.” And this desire is a manifestation of ambition, an ambition for the work—the art—to capture what can’t be captured otherwise, and even then can’t be captured entirely; which is to say, defeat is built into the mechanism.

Carl Philips - My Trade Is Mystery

240613

so full of experience I hardly know what to say. I feel as if I ought to say something, that if I write it will emerge, like pretending to retch in the best possible way, get it out there, find what the words say. through following the words a truth unspools itself; through following the unspooling you arrive at a new place. movement is the question of discovery. of finding, of not knowing-but-following.

It's strange; sometimes someone says a statement and the phrase burns itself into your memory, and you pick it up out of your memory with wonder, over and over again, as if lifting a delicate object from a bookshelf. "Do you see this?", you might ask, turning it around with wonder as your guest or friend nods, politely. "Do you see this, though?"

In college J says this (we are probably lying in bed, I imagine, or maybe we are just talking; I cannot remember. She had this way of saying things as if she didn't care about them, even though she clearly did; that's how she treated her architecture models; crafted with such deliberation, shrugged off as if it were an afterthought, really asking for the viewer to be persistent in seeing):

I have an uncle whose entire dream it was to see the sunset at the beach every day.

that was his dream?

yeah.

and did he make it happen?

yeah. he organized his entire life around this dream. he took some job to earn a bunch of money so that he could buy a house off of the coast of florida. he didn't care about the job; all he cared was the house on the beach.

and does he watch the sunset at the beach every day?

he does.

before that moment I had not fathomed that this could be someone's dream, and I found myself softly bowled over by the simplicity and clarity of the dream. somehow it seemed very concrete, something worthwhile, something Real, more so than "becoming a doctor" or "winning the nobel prize".

sure, even at the time I knew that this dream could surface a series of critiques: something about typical upper-middle class white americana leisure beach culture, etc. this dream seemed to pierce through this all, seemed not to be about luxury or a lifestyle but that it could be about a commitment to a world, the possibility of living your life according to the tenets of an experience.

a dream, in devotion to experience.

sitting on a cliff on the coast of northern california I look out onto a sunset and wonder if life could just be like this. there is too much to hold in a sunset and these waters; it is trying to say something to me, I realize, but I have not always been able to tune into its frequency. over repeated visits over the past few years I have narrowed it down, focused my antenna, have pinpointed the essence of this area that brings this particular taste into my mouth:

two years ago I was driving with my sister down this coast and went to pacifica. I must have written about this somewhere. walking on the beach we stumble onto a huge heart, crafted out of driftwood and flowers and tea candles. nearby there are teenagers and kids and some boxes of pizza and groups of people, standing around and talking in a way that made it clear that there was some invisible glue binding everyone together, some silent thread running through the gathering, organizing it into alignment towards the setting sun and the incessant waves. soon enough, I learn that this glue is death. near this heart I meet the mother, the mother of the son for whom the heart is for, her eyes full of so much gratitude and joy for people who came to pay their respects, her eyes full of so much grief transmuting itself through love.

what does the mother say to me, and what do I say to the mother? I have forgotten, but I remember her demeanor, the way she seemed cracked open to the world, somehow holding the lightning rod and letting the electricity pass through her, grounded, present, brimming, full of grief, full of gratitude.

I am the girl in raymond carver's 'why don't you dance', who was trying to get it talked out. a scattering of memories hold a series of tastes about the world, vignettes that deserve to be pieced together, I am trying to say, moments sounding like particular tones that, when composed together, craft a gorgeous drone. I wish to share this, but it is impossible, or if I were a more patient writer, perhaps it might work, but instead I try to tell you, here I am, gesticulating wildly, trying to write about this sound I hear, attempting the impossible, perhaps because I am not, as emily dickinson said, telling the truth but slant, but I am trying to get this to you, to you, or to me, to me.

in one of the first years after moving to new york, I remember taking a bus that crossed a bridge from brooklyn to queens. as the bridge rose over newtown creek the city suddenly became illuminated; manhattan in all of its sunset splendor suddenly emerging for a moment, this spectacular city on full display. I was glued to the window, soaking this all in. but looking around I saw that most people were looking at their phones, or reading books.

I remember wondering: how was this possible? how can you not see this? how was not-looking out of this window possible? are people just used to this, or too tired from their job, or have too much going on? is this what happens when you live in this city for a long time? would I too become inured?

at that moment I vowed (in the way that you can make a vow when you are barely twenty) to always look out the window at the city. I thought, with a youthful fierceness: 'the moment I do not look out is the moment I lose sight of myself. I will never not look out!' I blush a little bit, writing this now, but that was the spirit at the time, bombastic assertion, clarion declaration.

perhaps what I am trying to say is: I think the reason why I fear moving to this part of the world is because I think that if I saw these sunsets every day my life could truly be ______. and then I wonder, do I still have the fierceness in me to make another vow?

I am trying to say something particular, but hovering around the edges of it, like an astronaut in orbit, either suspended or in continuous free fall, depending on how you look.

what am I trying to say? I illuminate a series of points, so that I might find the connection between them.

what I am hearing the cliffs and the ocean and the beach say, is:

(these are waters that can see you)

and in response to this, I cannot say anything, and I do not. what do you say to a landscape that offers that to you? can I trust you, part of me thinks, but I dare not 감히 ask that to the world, so after I sit overlooking these waves for a moment I walk back along the path to the farm I am staying at in honor of my two friends who are getting married, and think about what these oceans have said to me. maybe I should write about this, I think. maybe I can hold it in words. maybe I can find whatever this strange feeling is, inside of me, and let it spool out onto the table and watch it gradually cool, like molten lava or glass settling into a glimmering shape. maybe I will then find what needs to be said. maybe I will learn. maybe someone else will also understand.

240611

Does one want to be right? On the “right side of history?”

Does one want an enemy? Someone clear to fight against?

Does one want revenge, disguised as justice? To see those who have hurt, get hurt?

Does one want to be “one of the good ones”? To have that become part of your identity?

Or do we want peace?

Are we in this because we hate some people? Or because we want to love more, because we are sorrowful, compassionate, knowing that it doesn’t have to be the way it currently is?

I see the same logics replicating themselves. What is at stake in I/P is not politics, not a conceptual political stance, but the question of one’s own moral code. Does your moral code allow you to hurt another? Does your politics say that, sometimes, compromising your morality is justified? That you can punch, just upwards?

Doesn’t this all sound trite, cliche? I used to think so, too. But what changed? Maybe you get to know people, more, or understand the intricacies of a life, or see the ways in which you have been hurt, or you have hurt.

(Upon rereading this, my words sound full of lament. But no, that’s not the whole picture; how do I articulate the beauty underneath this, too?)

240605

in the moment of saying something particularly alive and truthful there is a kind of risk; something teetering on the edge, a boulder that might roll. if is alive and not truthful then it feels bubbly, inconsequential, frivolous. if it is truthful and not alive it feels leaden, heavy, sour, sinking, or sometimes even a fierce-hot lancing. but to be alive and truthful, together is a shimmering boulder, a jewel of a center, a magic core in the center of your body emerging to meet the world for a moment in language, or movement.

240604

slowly and surely, the sound of a life changing.

240602

Esther Perel: “loneliness disguises itself as hyperconnectivity”.

the smell of summer mornings.

240601

As ever, the work continues.

The task of convivial living is the task of _____, I am certain. The many ways to not-quite describe this word are: ‘making decisions’, ‘knowing how to move’, ‘flowing with what’s present’, ‘following one’s self’.

The questions are not: “what do you want?”, which is a question I used to often ask to my students, or to myself, which I have since realized is often a futile kind of question, an impossible one, because you are asking the part of a person which precisely does not know because it has not been able to forget the name of what it sees, like asking a sketching hand, “what do we want the sketch to look like”, before lead meets paper.

the places that you meet yourself.

what do they taste like?

how do you like to travel there?

could you ever go there with others? or make a space like that, together?

these days I spend my time wondering where it is in others. I am convinced that this is a place each person knows, the way each person is a buddha already, or has the spark of atman inside of them, always already. this place was buried inside of me until I fell over, cracked open, and had no choice but to listen, or enter. what are the whispers that might allow a friend or a family member to awaken again? to listen?

what I sometimes want to say, only because it was my own path, was that it lies through a kind of devastation; a caterwauling of grief and sorrow that, on the other end of it, allows a kind of quietude. it turns out that forms of grief are always present, if you reach back and down far enough, and it turns out that the pipes sometimes need a good ol’ cleaning, a full flush through.

—

as this summer emerges I get glimpses of another world, a way of living, a kind of being I was able to occupy last summer. I hardly did any writing but the question that was present was: where am I? who am I? scatter your trajectory to the winds and the task becomes of regathering a sense of self that is not rooted in place, location, relation, but somehow gleaned from all of the interstices, the space between the film frames. one moment I can’t forget was the time spent doing laundry somewhere in Colorado, or was it Utah, one of those days in which life seemed to be going on for everyone else, except for me, waiting in a parking lot underneath an endless sky, looking over a road atlas, thinking about my life, wondering who I was.

This intangible feeling, out there. In Colorado, or Utah, you pull into a parking lot and enter an REI, a Home Depot, an auto parts store, a local grocery store, and the placeness of a place hits you as hard as the thicket of air conditioning does the moment the sliding doors open. Radio music on the overhead speakers, work uniforms, the smell of floor cleaner. Underneath a franchise or company-driven identity is some other kind of texture, I learned how to notice, the bare fragmentary spaces between the attempted seamlessness of a brand identity; graphic design and advertising and interior design conspiring together to articulate coherence. Maybe out there, these big box stores made sense, finally, not just as soulless replicated operations, but actually as futile struggles against the immensity of the landscape. A box store in a city or suburbia somehow seems to hold claim to the aura it advertises, somehow seems to really believe it for a moment. But out there, it felt very quickly like a kind of theatrical trick, a strangely collaborative exercise in belief that allowed, for a moment, everyone partaking in the belief to hold a solace of some kind. The big box store is not an institution, nor a church, nor a town hall, but it is hewn out of the same cloth, forged out the same metal, allows a kind of stable fixity that lies as a convenient site for usage/support/disdain. The big box store is helpful, you can say. I work there, you can say. I shop there, you can say. I hate it, you can say. I will never go there, you can say. Inside of it, a space you can wander, a place to go, for a moment, even if the place is oriented to push you through the checkout register. Because: beyond it, the landscape, the mountains, the endless world of expanse and possibility and death and life and the Real, actually more terrifying in a way that might make it easier to ‘hate the big box store’. What’s out there is the desert, the sky, the possibility of isolation, of solitude, and even worse-and-better, the possibility of meeting yourself in the landscape, of coming across your own spirit.

Does this make sense?

Having written this I wonder if something isn’t lost in the typical narratives of critiques of neoliberal capitalism. The risk in engaging with an undesirable system is that you begin thinking with the same logics of that system. ‘Walmart is bad, exploitative in such and such a way, using economies of scale to outcompete local stores towards bankruptcy in order to create an effective monopoly in the region, ultimately capturing the market and reducing local economic flows in the region’. Yes. With the logics of instrumentalization you have successfully categorized and critiqued what it is doing. But for a moment, when a hailstorm comes, you might throw it all out and rush in to take shelter, huddle with other strangers and peer out the glass doors to hope that the storm passes well. At that moment, is Walmart really Walmart, or is it a building and a collection of people, of humans wearing uniforms and performing particular roles, but momentarily suspended due to some catastophe? For a moment, one might write sappily, “we were all human”, but wasn’t this always the case, and wouldn’t this be incredibly condescending to say so, as if somehow a Door Greeter exists as an entity, rather than a human putting on a vest and playing a thin role?

(Of course this all is true, I know. What am I trying to say? I’m being loose with my logic; a lot is slipping through my fingers as I write this.)

What I am trying to remember is that feeling, the felt sense in my body, how a thing can start to become merely a collection of parts, the taste of the kind of belief required to really congeal it all together. Perhaps it’s that: a kind of delaminating is necessary; a kind of lamination is inevitable. I think about the name of a book I have not yet read but cannot get out of my head these days: “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”. Can you squint, and forget? The big box store in a desert landscape is something stuffed in a crack to stave off whatever is gleaming within. Can you see the necessary terrors of existence that it exists in distant opposition to? What it is trying to stave off is time, and thus a kind of death. The brand is eternal, and will live forever, its logos and logos will never age, a Dorian Gray of a store. Come to us and you will never die, it says, and perhaps you take its outstretched hand and dance together, before the storms roll in.

In the desert, though, it felt like the theatre was flat, or clearly breaking the fourth wall. When the sky and land is so, so much bigger than the human, the store is a strange kind of haven, because it is a false one. Does this make sense? Inside there is air conditioning and rows of kids’ jeans on sale and numbered aisles; outside, there is the relentless outside. The denial of the outside and the outside, both somehow working together to point towards something out there.

—

Intuition needs to look at things from afar or vaguely in order to function, so as to get a certain hunch from the unconscious, to half shut the eyes and not look at facts too closely. If one looks at things too precisely, the focus is on facts, and then the hunch cannot come through. That is why intuitives tend to be unpunctual and vague.

Lectures on Jung's Typology, Marie-Louise von Franz

—

Afterwards, what is next is unclear. The question at hand is: how to move. How you might flow? How did you learn how to dance? How did you learn how to teach yourself? How did you learn how to breathe?

240530

what computers need are IUI - intuitive user interfaces; perhaps these wouldn't even be called 'interfaces', but more akin to 'mediums'

'intuitive' user mediums? even this feels inaccurate.

a personal to-do list, for example, operates at a psychic register that is almost as 'meta' as possible; it shapes the meta-decision-making of everything I might do that day or week.

yet: to use a web-based to-do list is to open a laptop, then switch to a web browser, then to go to a URL/tab of the to-do-list, then find the appropriate list. I am, psychically speaking, four levels 'deep'.

In contrast, a paper to-do-list is immediately present in the world around me. from a psychic level, it is much more vivid and present than any kind of software. this is not an inherent quality of the software, but part of the regime of 'user interface' organization that has dominated computers in the age of windowed GUIs.

this was the 'interface' I really learned in love programming with, in sixth grade. it became a whole world. shortcuts were memorized, my fingers flew over the keyboard. to this day, I imagine it would take only a few minutes to realign with the muscle memory deep inside of my body.

What this meant was that the code editor became a place I could enter. I wasn't "using" the tool so much as I was navigating 'inside' of it, already, psychically. I held a psychic map of the place I was in, and was moving around it, the way you move around your familiar kitchen almost without looking, sometimes, closing the fridge door with your hip, left hand sliding a drawer open and reaching for a pair of chopsticks while your right hand reaches for the pan.

The kitchen is not an 'interface' for me. opticality is not always the primary way in which I navigate. It has become a place that I move through. somewhere in my mind, there is also a kitchen. the kitchen of the real world and the kitchen in my mind are as similar as possible; they align, nestle into each other, like stacking cups or a settled spine. the ways in which these align are not just optical, visual, but involve touch, location, my body.

In the place of Turbo C++, too, I moved around. my finger taps F2 as a nervous tic to save. With bated breath, I tap F9 to compile. The function keys exist on top of the keyboard, as well as on top of the screen; they hold a kind of meta-agency, a prioritized set of intentions of what I might do, which is to: save, to compile, to run, to try things out. I am not switching between tabs, opening files or folders, resizing windows, fiddling around with different graphical user interfaces.

the place I enter into is a shared place between the computer and myself. together, we are in contact, improvising, somewhere in-between. without it, I could not think in terms of code, or rather, I could not go there.

what I think is lost in computing or computers or in so-called "tech" today is the notion of a place of computing, a place in which you go to think, a place that is in your mind, not necessarily visual or spatial.

---

After I came back from living on the road and in the desert last summer, I read Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, which felt like licking a salty seashell in order to remember the ocean: primarily an act of remembrance towards something that is both out-there and in-me, looking at a finger pointing towards sky to remember the full moon. so here is a signifier:

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

Abbey's book was about his time as a park ranger in Arches National Park, in deep solitude, and the oncoming onslaught of vehicle-driven tourism that he foresaw as Arches would get paved. (decades later, all of his predictions came true.) At most national parks, it's hard to avoid the crowds. Arches is like a safari, unless you go late at night or in the winter. Monument Valley was beautiful but a harried experience, full of people (myself included) jumping in and out of cars in order to take a photo, here and there.

it is hard to find stretches of nature where nobody else is around, where the appreciation of solitude itself is part of the point. death valley, too, can be very busy. only when you hike out into the nothingness can you imagine being alone in a valley of death, does the scale of the world fully surround you, do you fully understand the scope of what it means to live.

in a valley of gods I found some solitude, for a moment, solitude from humans but not from being. there, I had to ask my non-human neighbors if it was okay to settle for the night; had to request explicit permission, and later in the evening protection, from a nearby towering butte, a remnant of the plateau.

writing this now in the density of noo-yourk-citay it sounds a bit humorous to speak of speaking to the desert, maybe even fable-like. or maybe it sounds metaphorical, a cute turn of phrase, but what I am speaking of is quite literal. I will tell you that when you are out there, completely alone, something can happen with the pores in your skin and soul that allow you to open wide, whether you like it or not. if it happens then you are no longer alone, but in coexistence with the deep humming energetic powerlines of land and landscape. for me, then, it felt like huge, quarter-size holes were in my body, like my skin was porous, or that an invisible jacket I had been wearing had turned to mesh, so I could truly feel the energetic breeze of the world on my body, the superfine hairs on my skin fluttering in surprise. what is this? what are we feeling?

once, millennia ago, I tried to recount something like this to a lover. as kind and sweet as she was, she furrowed her brows in concern and said, but you weren't really speaking to the landscape; you were speaking to yourself. at that moment, I knew that some kind of connection was not possible, that she was over there and I was over here, at least at the time. for some reason I wasn't able to tell her that she was simultaneously completely right and completely wrong, that you didn't have to pick between these two truths. maybe it was because it was the desert speaking from inside of me, and in the supercivilization of new york, of brooklyn, these words only land as abstract theoretical conceptual registers, something to do with 'belief' or the 'mind' or 'thought', rather than something your body knows.

what I am trying to get to is this kind of a shared place, a place in which you might truly meet the page, or the computer, or the landscape, as a way of meeting yourself and the other.

in contact improvisation my body touches another person's body. I am here and they are here, too. the more here I am, the more here I feel them being.

on tuesday I contact danced with someone who was hungry, eager, not fully present, and I could tell that he was somewhere else entirely, lost even, not entirely sure of where he was. while we were flowing in movement he pushed and pushed and pushed, and eventually I started leading him away, like a bullfighter, the backs of our hands touching at a single point, and eventually kept him running around the edges of the room, towards me, as I spiraled away in the center. I am not here for you to chase, I thought, if you know where you are I can meet you there, I thought. but he did not. eventually he tripped and fell and rolled, in its way part of the improvisation, and I wondered if he knew what I was doing; trying to arrive at the meeting-place underneath the moment of contact.

later upon retrospect I wonder if I could not have been clearer, or kinder, if I wasn’t a little bit mean from exasperation; it must have felt like some metaphorical chairs were being moved, I thought; perhaps that is why he ran, and ran, trying to chase the shared space, not knowing that it started with him, too. if I had been more experienced I might have found a way to communicate this inside of the space of movement. eventually I ended up deciding to slide out of the dance with a clear and firm 'thank you', smiling, my hand on my chest and physically withdrawing, but leaning in with presence, my eyes drawing his eyes into clear acknowledgment. I felt like a sea wall meeting him for a moment, something about him as a kind of fluid, meeting an clear surface, crashing back onto itself with waves, and waves, while I stood there, immutable, no longer flowing. this all, as my body moved back. perhaps this was the strongest moment of energetic clarity that I let myself exert onto him, and I saw a brief kind of confusion (and sadness?) flash into his eyes, as my own smile withdrew, and I returned to myself.

in its way this was a gift, I think, a clear kind of distinction between movement and presence, itself a kind of play that allowed me an understanding. the questions are: where are you, and where am I? I know where you are because I know where I am. I know who you are better because I know who I am better. always, this task, of knowing thyself, thus spoke myself, understanding who this person called 'me' is, turning this jewel over and over, or maybe savoring it in the mouth, or following it in curious delight, or maybe moving together in special moment, meeting together, at a place.

when I set out to write this, I thought about this thought I had in the shower this morning.

here I am writing, hoping that all of these trails will converge:

on the top of a mountain in the rockies, mount ida, I encountered marmots and pica, furry curious animals who clearly were looking at me, and me them. the trail to mount ida is not one of the most popular ones (maybe a dozen hikers a day), but is a high enough summit (12,874 ft) to perhaps only filter for a certain kind of nature-person. because of this, I thought, the animals were particularly open, a certain kind of co-presence was possible. no doubt, the quality of interspecies interactions has been shaped by generations of a certain disposition of hiker-person coming up to this place. in a parking lot of another national park, dozens of chipmunks knew how to be cute while taking snacks from your hand, while gaggles of enthusiastic tourists (myself included) took photos in delight. these chipmunks were fearless and performative, maybe, the terms of exchange clear; we be cute, we get snacks. up on top of mount ida, the marmots and pica were curious. sometimes on the trail, it seemed like I was hiking together with a marmot, it weaving in and out of boulders, looking at me, me looking at it. sometimes I would speak to it, chanting nonsense but thinking about the tone of my voice, my mamallian nervous system singing to its mamallian nervous system. I got the sense that the marmots were not asking for food, not domesticated, but interested in me, the same way that I was interested in them. who are you, they were asking, looking eye-to-eye with me.

this kind of interspecies presence is particular to that kind of moment and place. in that way, you could think of it as a very particular environment, easily destroyed by paving a road up to the top, not just because the built environment would change, but because the built environment would change the disposition of the humans arriving. the altitude provides the ecological niche that generates a particular kind of interspecies relation.

I am aware that I speak from a particular perspective, having lived in cities, or urban areas, most of my life. this kind of interspecies interaction was new to me, and even the natures that I have visited (national parks, hiking areas) have usually not allowed for this kind of co-existence, dominated by cultures of hunting, antagonism, or domestication, ecological preservation, and general human control over the environment. but what is it to meet another? even in meeting a dog, or especially a cat, there was a kind of limit to co-presence that I didn't realize until I met those marmots, maybe because the dog or cat is a pet, not a friend. is this what proverbially swimming with wild dolphins might feel like? what might it mean to meet a wild animal, to have a moment in-between, to be friends?

the point is that these possibilities must be getting rarer. a disappearance of wilderness is also a kind of disappearance or transformation of certain kinds of interspecies relationships that are possible. in wilderness, you might more fully meet entities, including yourself, the landscape, and other animals. what happens when wilderness is further and further from a life?

the point is, the point is:

the point is actually about a technosocial culture of connectivity:

where are the wildernesses between people? the chasms of communication? the periods of silence that allow for distance, and longing, and absence? the kinds of distances that allow for closeness?

what is humankind potentially losing, forever, because we are too connected to be close? and do not know how to find wilderness and solitude, whether in nature, or between us all?

what are the mediums that allow you to deeply enter into?

what is the wilderness and solitude that opens your pores?

what is the presence that is necessary to meet?

what is the absence that is necessary for presence?

240529

to be blunt, many of the conversations encountered these days are too light.
they do not have the weight that life seems to have. they feel translucent, delicate, like cotton candy, or perhaps like a meringue, a beautiful cloud, quickly crushed in your hands, dissipating into sweetness and quick nothings on your tongue, a brief memory.

when you hold an object that is important to a loved one, your hand becomes more you, as your attention arrives to be present. with your hand-body you might really attune into its weight in your hand; you might grasp it clearly and carefully, you might slowly turn it around, feel its texture under your hands, a precious object, to be attended with care.

these days, early-summer evenings in manhattan feel like this. summer evenings elongate a moment in time. some veil is pierced through. your heart (my heart) connects to the sky. after the party, the conversation, the gathering, under it all lies the echo of the street, the canyon, the desert. underneath the surface of the world is the dukkha constituting part of life. what are we to make of this? how do you speak of it?

(am I alone in this? hello; is this thing on?)

sometimes when I try, I get the sense that I am speaking about something simultaneously too crassly or elementarily, as if I am trying to talk about sex. talk about sex in the wrong way or at the wrong time, and it might be deeply inappropriate, yes, but also deeply boring, especially if you're speaking about it with someone who you're not having sex with. maybe life is like this, too; you need to be intertwined a bit, need to be having life with someone in order to sit for a moment, look out onto the glimmering water, talk about what's deep in your heart, put it out onto the table.

another answer is that looking like this, well, hurts. it hurts. the edges of your body stretch to encompass the place you begin to enter. perhaps you can manage to smile wistfully, or sorrowfully, or happily. you are asked to hold the bigness of a life, too vast to comprehend by the one traveling through it.

all of these words are futile attempts at articulating a felt sense, a way of feeling-being that is undeniably present. it is in each moment. when I walk to sit near the river at sunset, I find other people doing the same, and think: here are other people, too, who know the joy of looking far out into a horizon.

more than ever I feel my words are mere signifiers, crude whispers in a sacred moment. if my words do anything, they paint around a circle that I cannot speak the center of. in the center is a place, a sound, that suffuses the everyday. I am looking for the others that also enter into here.

240527

"The Movement's emphasis on "the personal is political" has made it easier for trashing to flourish. We began by deriving some of our political ideas from our analysis of our personal lives. This legitimated for many the idea that the Movement could tell us what kind of people we ought to be, and by extension what kind of personalities we ought to have. As no boundaries were drawn to define the limits of such demands, it was difficult to preclude abuses. Many groups have sought to remold the lives and minds of their members, and some have trashed those who resisted. Trashing is also a way of acting out the competitiveness that pervades our society, but in a manner that reflects the feelings of incompetence that trashers exhibit. Instead of trying to prove one is better than anyone else, one proves someone else is worse. This can provide the same sense of superiority that traditional competition does, but without the risks involved."

TRASHING: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, Joreen (aka Jo Freeman)

"The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other."

Exiting the Vampire Castle, Mark Fisher

240525

"The teachers of paradoxical logic say that man can perceive reality only in contradictions, and can never perceive in thought the ultimate reality-unity, the One itself. This led to the consequence that one did not seek as the ultimate aim to find the answer in thought. Thought can only lead us to the knowledge that it cannot give us the ultimate answer. The world of thought remains caught in the paradox. The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one’s love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

This leads to the emphasis on the right way of living. All of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action. This can be clearly seen in Oriental religions. In Brahmanism as well as in Buddhism and Taoism, the ultimate aim of religion is not the right belief, but the right action. We find the same emphasis in the Jewish religion. There was hardly ever a schism over belief in the Jewish tradition (the one great exception, the difference between Pharisees and Sadducees, was essentially one of two opposite social classes). The emphasis of the Jewish religion was (especially from the beginning of our era on) on the right way of living, the Halacha (this word actually having the same meaning as the Tao).

In modern history, the same principle is expressed in the thought of Spinoza, Marx and Freud. In Spinoza’s philosophy the emphasis is shifted from the right belief to the right conduct of life. Marx stated the same principle when he said, “The philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways—the task is to transform it.” Freud’s paradoxical logic leads him to the process of psychoanalytic therapy, the ever deepening experience of oneself.

From the standpoint of paradoxical logic the emphasis is not on thought, but on the act. This attitude had several other consequences. First of all, it led to the tolerance which we find in Indian and Chinese religious development. If the right thought is not the ultimate truth, and not the way to salvation, there is no reason to fight others, whose thinking has arrived at different formulations. This tolerance is beautifully expressed in the story of several men who were asked to describe an elephant in the dark. One, touching his trunk, said “this animal is like a water pipe”; another, touching his ear, said “this animal is like a fan”; a third, touching his legs, described the animal as a pillar.

Secondly, the paradoxical standpoint led to the emphasis on transforming man, rather than to the development of dogma on the one hand, and science on the other. From the Indian, Chinese and mystical standpoints, the religious task of man is not to think right, but to act right, and/or to become one with the One in the act of concentrated meditation.

The opposite is true for the main stream of Western thought. Since one expected to find the ultimate truth in the right thought, major emphasis was on thought, although right action was held to be important too. In religious development this led to the formulation of dogmas,endless arguments about dogmatic formulations, and intolerance of the “non-believer” or heretic. It furthermore led to the emphasis on “believing in God” as the main aim of a religious attitude. This, of course, did not mean that there was not also the concept that one ought to live right. But nevertheless, the person who believed in God—even if he did not live God—felt himself to be superior to the one who lived God, but did not “believe” in him.

The emphasis on thought has also another and historically a very important consequence. The idea that one could find the truth in thought led not only to dogma, but also to science. In scientific thought, the correct thought is all that matters, both from the aspect of intellectual honesty, as well as from the aspect of the application of scientific thought to practice—that is, to technique."

Erich Fromm - The Art of Loving.

'Politics' has replaced the hole that spirituality and religion has left. Is 'politics' is understood as a system of beliefs that one has to do 'right thought' with? Or is 'politics' about right action?

2405??

oh yes, I forgot.

in-between the interstices of a moment is warmth.

240423

A person, panicked and running, yells at the top of their lungs: "EVERYONE CALM DOWN!"

A protest whirls you into its trajectory; a protest is a shimmering mass of human emotions; like any human, a protest is a beautiful, important, often flawed, and deeply misunderstood thing, a surface for projective identification.

In engaging with the protest, you become the protest, too.

A protest is a surface for projective identification. In slicing off part of one's self, in projecting one's own shadow onto the Other, the protest replicates.

"no, you hurt us more."
"no, you hurt us more."
"no, you hurt us more."
"no, you hurt us more."

240413

Thinking is the problem.

Erich Fromm:

“The teachers of paradoxical logic say that man can perceive reality only in contradictions, and can never perceive in thought the ultimate reality-unity, the One itself. This led to the consequence that one did not seek as the ultimate aim to find the answer in thought. Thought can only lead us to the knowledge that it cannot give us the ultimate answer. The world of thought remains caught in the paradox. The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.”

What are computers outside of thought; what are technologies for experience?

As such, apps will never, ever suffice, in so far as they operate purely thinking-ly, without any kind of changed experiential quality. At the end of the day, you are staring at your phone.

So-called “humane” interfaces through voice are far from humane, but human-emulating. They require you to either hold the knowledge of what’s possible in your head, or to speak to an interface as if you would command a servant or an assistant. Voice interfaces become ‘convenient’, ‘easy’, ‘frictionless’ by minimizing action. Action and work are conflated as an undesirable expenditure of energy. What is lost is a savoring of an experience of being — producing, generating, acting, creating.

A musical instrument is not ‘frictionless’; a hike is not ‘convenient’. These are tools and experiences that shape who you are, while you play with them, gladly.

What would it mean for technologies to support the practice of being alive through experience?

240410

"attention is the beginning of devotion".

I'm not sure if it's clear what's at stake. These days, I want to ask my friends: do you see? could you arrive here?

Would you like to come here, with me?

Would you like to go there, together?

240319

James Carse: "a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play".

To lose in a finite game is to realize that the pursuit of 'winning' in the finite game was itself a loss -- a forgetting of the infinite game. Through loss, you re-arrive at an infinite kind of play, to see that 'to want to win' is a beginning of a loss in the first place. To win is to lose; and to lose was to learn, that to play is to play.

240317

The articulation of a moral compass is necessary; One should be able to articulate it from first principles, from the axioms that found it.

In the past, I would have cited Godel's incompleteness theory as a mathematical analogue, a convenient articulation to say that: in any (mathematical) system, its axioms cannot be proven, and must be taken as given. In any moral system, might this also be the case?

But now, I know, or my body says: these 'axioms' resonate with the quality of experience, with the memory of relation. A moral axiom originates out of a smile, a smell, a kind of love, a quality of relation you sought dear, you wished to protect, you wished to cherish. Each strand of experience stretched into strings, strung onto harps with a texture of like wads of formerly-sticky bubblegum, globular, tender, drying, golden, resonant, shining. Hovering in the center of a yelling heart, a falling axe, an outstretched fist, a caress of a cheek, a coat helped onto shoulders, a set jaw, a stir of rice, hovering in this is an amalgamation of experiences that defies information and knowledge and thus language, but exists as an experience alone. Through these experiences, we reverberate.

To articulate a wider morality, then, is to have wider experiences. A wider expanse of chords, a larger vocal range, more experiences strung onto the harp of the self.

240316

Happiness found in the moments between two steps. Nowhere else. Like in meditation, the breath is the place to be, the body already a home. There is no elsewhere to be, no more strong revelations to pursue, nothing more to seek (other than, perhaps, the joy of seeking). Am I always here? I am always here.

240315

This evening I shine at a friend, whose voice I am so happy to hear. I am so happy to be here, I think. So happy to be tracing out the trajectories of my life, to see the arc of it stretch out there.

240314

These days I think: to love someone is a joy, I think, a joy to the person doing the loving.

A while back, in the early days of cryptocurrencies, I remember reading an experimental whitepaper about an anti-hoarding currency that would wither if you hoarded it, and would grow when you exchanged it with others. The idea was to incentivize the movement of money in an economy. Obviously, this had all kinds of challenges and problems. One problem the paper asked was: how would you prevent exploitation of this phenomena if two people just decided to exchange their currencies back and forth with each other? Wouldn't they just increase their hoard? Wouldn't this be a loophole in the system?

Now I laugh a little inside when I think about that idea, because loving is like that, I think; the loving I am finding and arriving at, the loving that isn't reserved for romantic partners, but for friends; a loving that allows me to be fully present, not wanting anything for me; a love that feels like noticing; a loving that feels already here.

240314

Ah!

Software is magic.

But software 'apps' and 'products', are soulless.

The joy lies in the casting of magic, the open circuit board, the instability of a process, revealed. When it becomes packaged into something seamless, something 'user-friendly', then it begins to wither, shrivel.

My firm conviction is that everyone can witness this magic; the magic of opening something up, and seeing the magic and the intricacies inside, the wild and weird ways in which something is constructed. How you might, if you try hard enough, begin to follow along with the logic, delight in its operation, nod with realization at what it's doing, to understand (yes, yes, I see) with one kind of acceptance that understanding allows.

Another kind of acceptance lives in delight, when you put it back together, or when you behold it for what it is, no matter how it might move.

240313

What is at stake with the internet, with literature, with the built environment, with anything in our environments that was built and shaped is the soul, and the spirit, and the heart. Information and knowledge works in the mind, but meaning and wisdom is not found in the mind, but elsewhere. Are spaces designed with intellect? Or with wisdom? Are buildings designed with intellect? Or with wisdom?

240306

The opposite of 'a scarcity mindset' is probably not an abundance mindset, but rather a preciousness mindset; the recognition that we will have, then lose things.

Through software and computing the idea of 'backups' are possible. Is there some argument for the pervasiveness of computing that has eliminated the idea of digital loss, of floppy disk corruption, of a hard drive crash -- and thus of materiality, impernanence, preciousness?

240213

one day, the most difficult experiences of your life will become shimmering jewels that you prize.

240209

We adopt the mental model of the media we consume. The media (or any kind of sensory input) we consume is training ourselves; we learn from the world; our brains backpropagate. What's at stake is then our models of causality. Feed-based model consumption make non-probabilistic connections between content; one piece of content follows another.

When we watch a film, we are absorbing the products of an editor's painstaking focus on causality; someone focused for months, perhaps years on the proper sequence of images to understand a film. What a gift! From their mind to ours.

When we absorb a feed; especially an algorithmic feed, when there is no 'fade to black' between content, we are getting trained on non-connection, a-relevance. Connections that shouldn't be made are getting made; connections that should be made, aren't.

To use a food metaphor, 'junk food' might have been the past generation's invention -- of food that tastes delicious or addictive but is nutritiously bad for you. "Junk food" is a kind of straightforward 'fake', based on notions of 'interiority' --"the inside is different from the outside", to put it simplistically.

But feeds aren't "junk food". Picture a buffet restaurant full of any food you want. But in this restaurant, you carry a single bowl, and everything you want to eat gets continually placed in that bowl, without it ever been rinsed. Everything starts to taste like what the previous thing tasted like. You walk up to a station; they ladle a bit of chicken soup, and you eat it. Another station places a chunk of brisket in your puddle of chicken soup; you take a bite. Another station puts some chili on top of your brisket and chicken soup. Another station puts some caesar salad on top of your brisket and chicken soup. Another station drops a donut. The donut tastes like brisket and ranch. Ten reels in and your bowl looks like a slop of a mess. Want to drink some water? Your bowl just turned into a watery mess of donut-caesar salad-chili-brisket-chicken-soup.

In this buffet, strong flavors win out. Super-sauced or super-sugared food can overpower anything.

In this buffet, it's impossible to drink water, or anything subtle, or quiet.

But even worse, enough time spent in this buffet, and you forget what anything truly tastes like.

There are a few ways out. One way is to fast; to stop eating for a while and keep on just drinking water; at first, it will be gross, but over time, it will start to taste clearer, and clearer. Also, it's helpful to only commit to eating one meal at a time, between sips of water. Stopping eating and drinking water is abstaining, encountering the world as is; eating one meal at a time is reading books or watching a film; something long-form.

What is to be gleaned from this geopolitical conflict cannot be "those people are bad", let alone "bad things must be done to those bad people". Not only is it simultaneously boring and violent, it's absolutely maddening; a kind of mind-virus that propagates and snares you in its trap, with infinite closure. "Don't talk to those people; they will tell you that it's okay to talk to them." "They do bad things because they're bad people." A tautology.

Specifically, a tautology that works because in its axiomatic worldview, the tenets and lemmas and conjectures and extrapolations built on top of its founding axioms become consistent.

Past experiences coagulate and introject into internal dynamics. Personal and collective unconsciouses are created. A political belief knits together thought and emotional expression. It benefits me to believe, to be convinced, to think. With a political ideology, any belief or ideology, I form a mental model that I layer on top of the world, a new map for the territory. This map tells me something; danger over here, safety over there, and ways to traverse this canyon of ethics. The map is a device I use to navigate a territory. Sooner or later, I believe in the map. It is legitimately helpful, and sometimes does very good things, like increasing civil freedoms, reducing bigotry. When you share the map, you hold a shared language, which allows for communication.

But the map is just that; a map, with its own interpretative logic. The maps hold a lineage, because these interpretative logics have history, branching trees of schools of thought and argumentation.

What's the territory? What does it mean to navigate a territory? When do you put away the map and learn to exist with your bodymind, your intuition, and learn to understand the landscape?

Perhaps the better question is: what questions should you (we) have asked so that we (you) wouldn't have been in this position to begin with?

What kind of approach would have been (x)?

(let X = an element in the set of { noble, just, with integrity, soulful, truthful, beautiful, kind })

Everything is in everyone. The question to ask is: what would you learn if you imagined you were that person?

What's at stake is not so much "whose side are you on"; but rather, "what kind of person do you want to be"? To whom do you owe your integrity to? In service of what?

my strongest hottake of 2023 is that touchscreens are bad, keyboards are good. fingers on keys = a proximity to typing, and thus a cognitive proximity to writing. touchscreens = the ability to consume content.

bring back laptops in bed!

one thing that saddens me deeply is righteousness. the abandoning of one's principles in favor of being on the "right side of history", whichever side that is. what is noble about tearing down posters? what is noble about shrugging off some deaths if it's about 'the other side'? what is noble about claiming victimhood?

anger serves a protective function; sometimes it serves a numbing function, also, to stave off deeper feelings that are too painful, such as grief. what's happening is tragic. a group of people re-enacting generational trauma, the classic story, the oppressed becoming the oppressor, but unable to see it, because they believe themselves to be the victim. and this logic repeats itself ad infinitum, the original meme; hurt people hurting people.

behind every act of violence is another act of violence. climb that chain and you just get many painful yet beautiful stories of flawed people trying the best, given what they had. how can we not emphasize with everyone in their struggle to survive?

what do you say about an act of violence committed because they believed it was just? that their victimhood allowed this violence? that, having been on the receiving end, they know how to wield violence responsibly? do they know that this is the trap?

do you not see that this is tragic, immeasurably tragic, for everyone, and the inability to start from this position, that everyone must be loved, especially the oppressed, lest they turn into the oppressor, and especially the oppressor, since they were once oppressed?

(is this true? what about hegemony? perhaps this only stands for non-hegemonic forms of oppression)

power is usually asymmetrically distributed. (legal, military, monetary, cultural, relational power)
emotions, bodies, experience, and suffering is not. a person is a person, a sufferer is a sufferer.
when one suffers greatly, the suffering takes over one's personal experience, and thus one's own world.
when it appears that the whole world (as one knows it) is at stake, it's tempted to act (with one's power) to defend it.
two unmeasurable lives take up two measurable forms of power.
when one acts with one's power according to one's world to create suffering in others, steps 1-6 are repeated. (to be modified.)

a few questions follow.
a. how do you know that the world is your world?

b. what do you know of your power?

Nov 1, 2023.

on knots, trauma, and taking sides.

If someone harms you or your loved ones, will you seek revenge? Will you harm them or their loved ones as revenge? Who has the right to transact their victimhood and trauma as a free pass for retributive violence?

(What are stable models of resolving conflict within a community? The Balinese cockfight - a way of resolving deep conflicts that allows people to walk away without harm done to each others' family? Takanakuy in Peru, where people in a village get to fist fight each other once a year on Christmas day in refereed matches with the idea of resolving conflicts with a fight and a hug? The scapegoat -- according to Girard, a regular occurance of peace formation by the unconscious formation of a 'monstrous scapegoat' that allows former enemies to unite together? )

"Taking sides" is an inevitably ethically compromised position, because it does two things; it handcuffs together the past and the future, or specifically, "people I cared about" and "people I shall care about".

"Do you not support us? Do you not see our humanity, and how we have suffered?"
"Of course I do!"
"Then, will you be on our side?"
"I want to be on everyone's side."
"How can you be on their side, when they have done this to us?"

Something happens between point 4 and 5; some transformation, a kind of unconscious sleight-of-hand that allows this point 5 to be repeated ad infinitum. "How can you be on their side, when they have done this to us?" Will you be our enemy, or our friend? Psychological splitting on a group level: 'we are all good, they are all bad'.

Once, when I went through a deeply painful conflict, a wise friend asked me to describe the entire conflict, but substituting the word "I or me" for everyone involved. Soon, this started to sound like an experience of tragic self-harm, where I was angry at me, and hurt me, and was sad for me, and so on. I felt foolish, and sad, seeing how "I" had behaved. Was this all "I" was?

How can you be on our side, when we have done this to us?

The rejoinder will be: "But we are not them! They are not us!" Isn't this the constitutive divide that makes this conflict work?

A meaningful, compassionate care for specific people (friends, family) involved in a conflict, and preys upon the desire for belonging and community by utilizing one of the primary mechanisms of policy/power, which is the line drawn in the sand, the demarcation that is the "vs" in "US vs THEM". Rene Girard says this is an old strategy, as old as millennia, in which the scapegoat is a classic role that unifies a community by ousting a psychic projection of conflict. But still: a morally compromised position, operating along the lines of power AND an appeal to emotional safety than virtue or ethics.

To take a side is to claim belonging, find a way to direct your support, feel accepted and needed, and to find a philosophical logic that enables the feeling of some kind of superiority. On the powerful side, it looks like camaraderie, a code of being, about honor, tradition, pride, care, and mutual respect (but only for “us”.). On the protest side, it looks like ethical valor and righteousness, the feeling of “being on the right side of history”, of pride in one’s solidarity yet anti-identifiction with the weak, of the solidity of one’s own ethics.

I think this is why I/P is so hard to talk about, how fetishized it is, how it generates conflict even through discussion. Anchoring the conflict is decades of intergenerational pain, specific memories of specific people, and it asks you to take a side, and even more, to take revenge. Revenge seems justified by the impulse to defend; defense is about maintaining the body, which transmutes into a desire to maintain the status quo.

And when notions of justice have been modeled after state-sponsored violence, how will you recuperate a virtuous way of being that might stand anew?

hot take: politics is an abstracted morality; the expression of a personal morality (superego?) projected onto a world surface. in theory, this projection from an internal reality to an external reality is a mapping of one's own moral code. however, the strength of this projection is amplified by guilt. the bigger one's own guilt of moral transgressions, misadherations to one's own moral code (which are an inevitable part of being human: failing and trying again), the bigger one's own need to find firmness in the fully coherent image of a complete politics. through the clarity of a political stance, one absolves oneself of moral guilt.

(by politics I mean the discourse of politics, the whirling mass of discussion around nation-states, history, identity, conflict that usually boils down to "who should exercise their power in such a way'; the normative worldview that news media / nation-states subscribe to; I should have a better definition of this, but here we are -)

I would say that this is the constitutive dynamic of politics. it's not that "we often project onto politics"; it's more that "politics is what we call a specter of projection". politics IS the ghostly image hanging in the air. follow politics all the way down to the constitutive turtle and you find individuals intersecting with technology; you find emotions, motivations, greed, anger, revenge, embarassment, fear, hurt, love, intersecting with policy, the military hierarchy, social media post, the rifle, the passport, the barbed wire, the tank. this amalgamation of socio-technical assemblies (which, are everywhere), become neatly cleaved into dissected parts: the "social", the "technical", they say. politics becomes "out there", this thing that we must protest for.

but when you arrive; what is to do be done? is it a continuous deferral? at some point it becomes about the present; about what you might stand for. resigning from a position because you find it intolerable -- I think this is noble; I think this is the collapse of political deferral, and instead the maintainenance of a personal code of integrity. protesting against abolition yet feeling glee at the 'wrong people being punished'; either this is the beginning of a rend, a tear between 'how I must live my life' and 'how they must live their life'... or it's also the constitutive shadow-generator, psychological splitting, this originating denial is the force that allows a political conviction to take hold, that there are things to fix "out there", that there are bad people to be stopped "out there in the world", rather than realizing, like the solzhenitsyn quote goes, that "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being; and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

instead of destroying the self, the other is destroyed, or a call to destroyal is rallied against. the abstraction of this reality finds various different techniques to manifest itself and further reinforce this abstraction (race, religion). in the phrase, "we must destroy them"; them and we are the same thing, two halves of a whole called "me" and "shadow-me", but by drawing this neat cleavage, "shadow-me" becomes them, fully hateable, and suddenly the full force of self-loathing, guilt, anger, generated by a blocked grief, thrums open, like a purring engine or a game of life glider gun, a, unstable angry loop, humming. and suddenly! the creation of a "we", a ‘beautiful’ (that is, violently beautiful) we, in which one's participation is fully guaranteed, certain, the enveloping camaraderie "we" of solidarity. never mind that this "we" is generated by its equally certain "they".

a trick, a sleight of hand. by turning one uncertain question into two certain opposing answers, an incredible engine is created. nuclear fission; by cleaving apart a secure bond, we trigger a cleaving apart of secure bonds. the uncertain question is "how should I live this uncertain, confusing life in the right way? what is right?" the two certain opposing answers are: "we who are Good; we must oppose those who are Bad."

and I see this spread, memetically, or perhaps like nuclear fission, each immediate impulsive response generating the conditions that created the response in the first place. "hurt people hurt people", also, a kind of propagation through the network. "hurt people hurt people" is a descriptive statement allowing for compassion, but it's also a note of warning; that if you are feeling hurt, you might hurt others; if your hurt fills you with anger, it's likely that acting in this anger will create the hurt that will fill others with anger; if your anger-filled hurt seems to give you some clear answers, it's likely that these clear answers will give other people anger-filled hurt that will give them clear answers, too.

to me, the question comes down to: this way you want to act; is it what you'd like to receive, truly? the golden rule, it seems, is just not a law to dictate one's own actions, not just a kantian categorial imperative, but also a spell of sorts, a karmic spell about the fate of the universe; that the way to receive what you wish is to give what you want to receive.

---

so. israel and palestine. I see the IDF invading gaza, sowing destruction in the name of 'defeating hamas'. hamas attacks israeli civilians. idf / bibi & israeli's right-wing government and right-wing protests calling for bloodshed. organizations like bt'selem and jvp calling for peace.

I see two sides.

I see people angry, people upset, people righteous. rightfully so. but do we know?

bursting in joy after seeing an old friend. the joy of getting older is the joy of seeing old friends.

the contemporary internet is a city made only of streets.

when will you let someone buzz you in, climb some stairs, arrive at someone's dwelling? in visiting someone's home or studio there is a shock of unfamiliarity, of new patterns of being, of being able to recognize details that the dweller themselves cannot. this is because you are not meeting "a person" and "their home", but are encountering a dweller-habits-dwelling hybrid, an amalgam, a singular phenomenon that transcends taxonomy. Upon arrival you are a stranger, not knowing if you should take off your shoes, where the bathroom is, or what "make yourself at home" might really mean. Soon you learn what chairs to sit on, what is touchable or not. eventually over time, you, too, gradually learn to merge with the habits-dwelling, absorb and get absorbed, learn how to jiggle a doorknob, feel for the right light switch, reach immediately for the cutlery drawer, blend into a way of living.

where is this on the internet in 202X? where do you encounter someone's home on the web?

truth #34502: one day, I will look back onto the present moment (now!) and laugh at how vivid and luscious my life was, and how little I understood it at that (this) time

a device that plays a single song because the song is so immense that it demands, beckons, conjures up an entire world, and could only be held by a singular material object

an internet that tickles like you're whispering into someone's ear; an internet shaped like the sensation of reading a letter on a rainy day; an internet that is as appropriately _____ as nature already is; of quietude.

reminding myself that nothing less is at stake than working on the largest ____ of one's _____

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