so, so.

an opening into the world.

yet another incantation sprouts.

--

wasn't this always about seeing what happens? this, on the page, letting the words fall forth, letting them tumble out, allowing that particular feeling latent inside of my fingers to take hoold and spool forth. was this an incantation, a moment, a revelation, a transition, a what? what did this mean?

what roils in my heart is a kind of tender magic. sadness, wistful joy, desire, longing, acceptance. what did it all amount to? someone at a picnic asks me, "to what end", and I hear the question but I let it go; these are not ones that I need to answer, right now. some questions are questions seeking answers, questions that craft a conundrum in their wake, not quite a chicken-and-egg but rather the creation of a slipknot out of a seamless line. a flick of a hand that can suddenly create a knot, or disappear it.

--

recently I was driving back from providence to NYC and felt it, that kind of eternal loneliness, or something. in the northeast it exists in the interstices between things, and appears to arise from suburbia, appears to manifest on the highway, appears to pour up in the night, I think, and I think that's the force that can keep NYC what it is; a fear against that something in the night. I remember D talking about it during college; at the time, I thought was a kind of city-kid fear of suburbia, something to do with stereotypes of stereotypes of suburbia that I wasn't really familiar with, but at least understood to have something to do with childhood experiences, associations of home, love, disappointment, family, heartbreak, all stuff of writerly origin, you know? NYC the city that people come to find something in, still.

but now I don't think this is true. now I think what wells up in these drives is just a variant of what's already elsewhere. it's possible and true that certain landscapes of over-optimized infrastructure might contribute kind of starkness to it, like a metallic taste that you might happen to feel on the edge, like only when you run your tongue over your teeth. maybe it's like a particular kind of way of drilling for groundwater, strangely (or not-so-strangely) over-extractive, like when you have a zit and spend too much time squeezing at it the wrong way, such that perhaps the deed was done, but now everything surrounding is red and enflamed and angry even further. like this, the drive back from providence was surfacing this further, surfacing a particular quality of worldliness, squeezing it all into a kind of melancholy entering my heart, holding my world.

and what of it? what does it mean? what does it smell like?

it smells like a history that has known what it is to ____.

--

어느새 37세가 되었다.

어느새, 어느새. 어느새 38세도 되고, 40세, 45세, 50세, 65, 81이 되겠지.

what I do have are these words of a moment, these memories of a life to mark me here and present. these have been my shimmering jewels, my love of a life, my hearth.

let me sing of where I am, dear future self, you who are older, older, younger, younger, you who are looking back at me, wryly, that wry smile.

I am 37, living in greenpoint. on january 6, 2023, we meet the sun in the desert. in april 2023, in death valley, I die a little. in the summer of 2023, I drive across the US, and find so many ways of living. I visit mercy hospital for the second time. I go see the blue house, and then the place I went to montessori, with the sharp left turn and the banana trees I swore I remembered. I visit the school in which I first performed magic, of dehydrated water, now a construction site, an appropriate end to a kind of memory. even now, a year later, snippets of vividity enter my horizon of awareness.

and then: a conference: and then: friends in la. and then: vipassana in the desert. and then: a return back. and then: I meet E. and then: we eat strawberries at the beach of the rising sun. and then: I say hello to the sun again. and then: a monk in red leads me to a frozen lake that whisper to me. and then: I sit every day, every day. and then: I apply. and then: E steps back. and then: I go to the water, and see the soft geese, and sit in the beach, and let my heart go. and then: I see the eclipse with mom and dad, a moment that cracks open the sky and then: I look mom in the eyes, tell her I forgive her, inside the still still quiet of a cabin-held-fire and then: I touch and overlap with E again, a sincere and pure-hearted singing of the strings I hold and then: E steps away, and we close a chapter, as I pivot to turn towards the future.

the world is opening, and closing. I am living, and dying. marie louise-von-franz says: the goal of life is to die. to die wisely.

I am sitting and finding shimmerings.

I am orienting and dreaming of a held focus, a self shaped like a cone, but at the same time I imagine I must follow the shape I am already.

when I flow, I discover parts of myself that I do not know. these words just arrive from me; my goal is to channel them, to allow them to emerge onto this page.

there is a moment in all of this. in writing this, I attempt to surf, or what I imagine surfing is like, catching the edge, trying but not too hard, holding but not holding, doing but not doing.

at least: this time, if I might fall, as I have done, I know how to get up. once C told me that the first thing you learn while sailing is how to un-capsize.

this was an important lesson, I remind myself. it taught me how to get up. when they teach people how to do backflips, it starts with learning how to fall down, and then to roll, and to get up, and then and to connect it all. when falling down and getting up happens in sequence, it becomes a roll.

here I am, rolling. hello, hello, hello, hello hello! I hope you are well! you who are older! looking back at me! I imagine you are thinking: "that was a special, special time." I am thinking this too.

and yes-and, with the infinite wisdom that someone of your past already holds, is and must and is already saying to you: "you are in a special, special time, too. let the knowledge of your _____ hold the point of the needle that pierces through the veil of the daily and allows the glimmer of the sun to shine through."

love you! -me & us

oh here it comes oh here it comes. in the distance. chugging along. turning the corner.

sudden whiff of summer, full of empty rooms where this internalized superego of a bustling studio will no longer exist, among other absences.

slowly I can feel myself becoming real again. not quite yet -- there's a week left, or two, but it's there. a dehydrated self swelling, absorbing, growing. the anticipation of cool night breezes, walks, bike rides. nights where nobody's around. decisions to be made. mumbai, istanbul, new york, jordan, korea, etc, the building of a machine, the lighting of a bonfire, the opening of a book, hurricanes, farms, books, readings, libraries, ..

iphone, subway, all from may 9 - may 12

Part of the spark of an idea is that it persists throughout the entire project like the 잔상, a ghostly afterimage on the retina that exudes its own purplish presence wherever you look. A building is a building but if you can get that originating spark to glow enough everything becomes overlaid with the rich dissonace of communal usage. Without it things don't cohere, like a heated series of arguments that never converges into a debate.

Moment, as in brief but also ad in momentum, movement, vector anchored at a start and straining (collar presses against neck fur) forward, that strain being movement, directionality. Movement on a street, on the side of a building, spaces becoming so very optical.

Looking back over my shoulder on dean and Flatbush I suddenly abruptly experience a sort of subiomity that's been jolting me lately. City in my hair and music in my ears. How long does this last, I wonder, then quickly banish those questions and all that's left is a series of experiences to look forward to and to experience now. Accidental grin. Where else could I be? I am blessed to be in the thick of it all, to be running.

A couple (?) sleeps on the train. Sleeps, or is coming up/down. Together they gyrate in slow-motion circles, grasping errant bars, ends of chairs, shoulders of strangers. Rather than squeezing themselves into a corner and molding themselves asleep they've decided to take up most of the seat, and as such they bend, fall, rotate, two
wilting flowers gently being twirled in sticky ten-year-old hands. The coming of their sleep is so tangible that I wonder why I will not be next, my legs giving away as I slowly fall to the ground, eyes sliding quietly shut.

How many times have I logged onto this website so late, just to start an entry with the current time? Flipping through the archives I notice a slew of entries written in the dead of night, as if the sieve of late night + residual words on my fingers necessitates writing something light and small on to this website.

I'm writing a paper about an piece of art without depth, that stops short and exists as spectacle, does not permit entrance. In the face of this wall I am forced to turn in circles, negate this work of art, act as negative critique. I don't like this negativity. This is why this paper has been taking so long.

What I would rather be talking about: how do we deal with the fact that papers are by definition coherent and structured? Barthes's death of the author is legitimized by the fact that language is always a social construct, like when Derrida says "there is no outside-the-text" he means that everything is always understood in a signifier-signified relation and so therefore a movement outside of this relation is impossible. In the face of this linguistic definition for the negation of the artist's intention and the birth of the reader, what is then the purpose of a paper that then either falls into 1) ultimate coherence and becomes a proposal of 'correctly applicable' theory, or 2) functions as an ultimately individual and personal viewpoint? The former would be somewhat like Northrop Frye's notion of a Shakespearean green world, in which a plot device operates with certain functions across several works by the same author and so expands our personal understanding of the author in terms of his structuring of 'what has happened' and 'what this plot point does' - an objective scrutiny of these operations. The latter would be like Barthes's definition of the photographic punctum that illuminates just the individual point within the photograph that resounds emotionally and personally with the single viewer him/herself. In the midst of this, how am I ever comfortably supposed to write a coherent, thesis-laden essay about the operation of the punctum -- wouldn't this be a contradiction in terms, trying to objectify the operation of the subjective?

or maybe what I'm missing probably is that an operation of subjectivity is possibly objective, the same way that I can choose on an irrational and faithful basis to be rational ('I don't know why, but I believe that I should be rational'), so this isn't quite exclusive. rationality chosen with an irrational meta-methodology, the same way that democracy is erected on a 'pre-political' or meta-political non-democratic selection process ('who gets to decide the people who get the right to vote?'). Perhaps a scrutiny of this pre-democracy is separate from a critique of democracy itself.

or is it?

how can I ever move beyond the dangers of canonization, of a formation of canonized llterature/art/music? Isn't the notion of marginalization the complement of canonization?

how does one deal with writing about art that was brought into a canon more or less because of the intersection of factors -- aesthetic appeal, art-historical appeal, popularity, financial viability -- several which seem completely arbitrary to the 'merit' of the piece?

to offset this all:

James Joyce, Ulysses

voiding my bladder I think:

Sometimes, sometimes when I start to write the core of the essay, the center of cohesion that I try to curl the paper around, I start out by writing a very simple formal description, then moving forward, and in a purely aesthetic fashion creating a sequence of words that is appealing for its cadence, its structure, the formation of words in a structure of a thesis. I then look back on this pretty structure and I ask myself -- do I believe in this? If so, it stays. Usually, I don't, and I change it, again following aesthetic arguments and structures, ask myself this question, arrive at this space until I read an argument that I wholly agree with. In this way I am always following aesthetics, the curling linear logic of parataxis and syntax, stepping off when I happen to arrive at a destination.

In mathematics, this would be the sieve method of finding prime numbers.

Whenever it happens nicely I am always pleasantly surprised, caught unawares, finding these sensible yet interesting arguments developing under my fingers. No doubt this probably contributes to some notion that what I am saying is true, really true, and so fuels my essay further with the compressed fossilized fuels of problematics and positivism, the separation of the subjective author from the argument as evidence for the facticity of the argument, et cetera..

I'm tired, tired, so tired that things seem to be zooming down, moving slowly. Comprehension settles in a second after I look at something, this, then this, then this. Tiredness, tiredness, these things to worry about. Factors, considers, ideas, thoughts.

note: idea: camera pacifier, pacificara..? consolation for cheap p&s taj mahal takers, work-ethic vacationing, progress-bar photographers

--

this is hard. it's hard, it's work, it's effort. the swallowing of pride, to make it happen, to make things work. compatibility underrated, active movement. out of spite sometimes I'd like to slam the door and see what happens and regret profusely, irrevocably, wrongly. what I really need is patience. it's hard, tiring, beautiful, harmonious, stressful.

this night deep, sunken blacks etched into skies less far away from sunrise than I'd hoped.

tired tired tired tired and sitting alone. haven't felt tired in this way, ever. I have work to do. the slowing down of movements. When I open my eyes things rush together out of particles forming images.