comes and nudges her head against my hand, flapping ears against fingers, whiskers against fingernails. part of the joy of a cat is the tender sensation of the not-me, the external, the not-self, the initial wonder at autonomy and a breathing warm heart that approaches you with each successive touch and purr. these things walk, they pad and look around and yowl out in a quiet familiarity that makes you wonder. warms your heart.

lately I've been thinking a lot about the social use-value of art, coming at it not from the origin but climbing backwards tracing the trail of its repercussions, manifestations. entertainment and art on flip sides of the coin called comprehensibility, maybe, mystery.

lately I've been thinking that everything's about boundaries and the rending that happens when you move beyond them; being exposed to something you've never seen before; celebrating an aura of the mystique, the hidden; mental blockage along the lines of barthes' third meaning that relies on not-knowing what is going on. celebrations of the non-me, the non-self. it's not so much the constitutive other that's been defined in relation to the self but the little membrane between familiarity and unfamiliarity that's always being broken, constantly, regardless of where the self happens to be at this point.