words.provolot.com

last year (has it already been that?) I said:

be certain. move with momentum that imples a desire, not a dogmatism. feel free to change your lines of sight. lean inwards. remember to let yourself trust yourself, the best parts of yourself, to be able to count on the solidity of your own being that you have built up from base principles. everything is constituted out of feedback loops that either negatively oscillate or positively accumulate into intensification. all the cliche things originate out of seeds of truth, as you know, that repeat, return, continue to circle back towards yourself as newly gained, even more newly gained understandings.

this year, I will say: none of that, and all of that.

I realize how privileged I am to have these trips to Korea punctuate my being, little pressure releases that give me perspective outwards. nothing to give you perspective like the media culture of another place that you fully comprehend but can't fully contextualize. nothing like flying on a plane and seeing the world recede away from you, all minuscule, scaled. nothing like encountering another set of processes, not just as a tourist or even a traveler, to make you fully realize, fully emphasize that all processes come laden with their own baggage. context. all of these realizations, understood in concept like the force of a playful slap (measured in newtons, 1/2 * m * v^2), realized in practice like sensation of impact (measured the timbre and quality of exasperated noises emitted and the width of a pained grin).

so. all of that goes to say. resolutions, for an abstract set of principles, manifested in a concrete list:

1) make rituals, appropriately deliberate and necessary: a shower that ends when it ends, a cup of coffee, a clean table.

2) fewer quick fluff articles, exemplified by the nytimes. more longform, more books. zoom out. if you wouldn't read the korean equivalent, why read the english one?

3) go with your gut. "if I wasn't scared, I'd do X"; mapped onto the world.

4) gently distance, of not disengage, one's self from exchange-oriented discourse. withdraw from hearsay and society. make work. make more future-friends, fewer network-nodes of socialization. tease apart the knots of institutions and grab the threads that matter.

4.1) I mean, do the math: in a community of 100 people, all doing year-long projects, this means that every 3 days you hear of one fully-fledged, developed project. it seems like machine-gun-fire of interesting-ness. and yes it is. but those 100 cumulative years are slow, procedural. full of showers and coffee and clean tables, a river out the window. etc.

5) do the things that make sense, not the things that should make sense.

6) in the giant game of strategy vs tactics, abandon both and operate at the level of a mountain climber putting one foot in front of the other, which is not either a micro nor a macro level gesture, not just either tactics or strategy, not just detail or big picture, but a quasi-gesture (ala quasi-object) starting from a primordial soup and spreading in all directions.

6.1) in other words: don't do, and do again: do again, and do again again.

7) I mean, were you ever here to be a tourist? operate as if a traveler. the map as a device to allow one to discard the map. wander and seek out this local fast food place serving russian beer soup, that shrine of contemporary culture where the juicy knot of contemporary processes (ANT networks) has especially coagulated, this artifact of infrastructure. drop the shrines, the museums. when have you not? haven't you always? haven't you always.

8) lose an audience, a spectator, a viewership.

7.1, or 9) operate as if wandering. on a walk. guided by curious feet.

10) perhaps this means: sustained wonder through a form of calculated naivete. the pursuit of processes through laser-sharp directedness. find answers in physical processes (farm visits, bed rolls, walks, wanderings) as conduits for answers that have no precedent elsewhere. there is no metaphor for the shower, no simile for a cup of coffee, no analogy for a winter chill. these things constitute primordial analogies, the elemental building blocks -- that is just for me -- forming the vocabulary for the explication of my world, my world-processes.