imagine: a cone radiating from a person's face, with an angle of about 120 degrees, stretching infinitely far, so that whenever someone moves their head to scan the street for passing cars, say, the far ends of the cone sweeps speed-of-light-rapidly along buildings, people, skies, scapes, windows, trees, to rest on a series of cars, and back.
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as I say to D on a Friday night; as P says three years ago. one of the most valuable lessons is to become internalized, to walk with yourself, to do the things that you need to do. "what you should do" dissolves in the broth alongside "time" and "resources" and "surrounding people", and when you skim something off the top and place it in the compost bin to become the raw energy for some other venture, what's left is the pot is an entirely different mixture neither less of a part or more than "shoulds", and in fact a purely alchemic, synthesized creation, maybe. something along the lines of: how does the work make you move? when faced with your own fascinations, in which direction do you go? imagine: that cartoon scene of laying-down-tracks-as-you-go, perpetually on rails and creating the conditions of those rails, all at once.
or in other words: I realize more and more that I am happier doing the things that call to me. this is a statement that is the sublimated endpoint of a visceral realization, so it will always fall flat and/or in relation to the reader. like saying: "travel is important", which is one of those phrases that especially condense a million different things into a single phrase that actively creates a wide spread of conflicting / dissenting opinions, rather than consensus, as one normally thinks language would do.
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as another point. how do I explain the things that I think about? currently there are perhaps only a handful of people I could feel on stable ground to elucidate my own worldview and then to discuss with it. actor-network theory mixed with oop / anti-oop paradigms of programming mixed with this visceral marxist-influenced sensation that everything is made out of human labor + unstable, stochastic, unpredictable processes (neither "natural" or "man-made", more like 'emergent'), and so that law, theory, these things are commodity-oriented understandings of knowing how the world works that assume a stable subject, given realities, that right now heuristics (military, computer programming, christopher alexander-esque patterns) seems to be away out, that marxist labor too needs to be rethought in terms of an effort-oriented paradigm. that all tools and functions are simply objects that perform a certain function, evaluated historically and then given a name based on the closest function that it performs. What is a knife? a knife is an object that most often is used / is easily used to / is understood to perform the act of cutting.
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nothing is square, no surfaces are planar, no timelines are linear, time approaches you at different densities, no actors really have singular values. apples are only comparable to apples after they've completed a series of steps, many of them involving insurance policies mitigating risk, standardized agricultural growing methods and sorting methods that create normative sizes/types of apples, regular and reliable supply chains and delivery mechanisms, and finally, the creation of an constantly consistent (money) commodity on the other side that can meet apple A and apple B. Axomatically an dollar is always worth a dollar, so if Apple A is worth a dollar, and if apple B is worth a dollar, then apple A becomes fungible with apple B.
Or: if a piece of metal with a certain profile and shape is often used to cut and spread a piece of butter, then it becomes often called a butter knife. My credit card may as easily cut and spread a piece of butter. A wood file may as easily create cheese shavings as well as wood shavings: see Microplane. These things become called 'innovations'.
on the internet and across boardrooms everywhere: someone asks: what kind of innovations are there? cue the 14-point taxonomy of innovations, etc. but if one understands "the knife" to be a term retroactively applying a performance onto a piece of material object, then what do you answer when someone asks "what kind of knives exist in the world?" what does a knife look like? what does an object that often performs certain cutting functions look like? what things can cut?
a knife is easier, because sharpness appears to be a physical characteristic - but really, it's a relative evaluation between two objects, like the mohr scale of hardness. the question is always, "sharp in relation to what?" the postfix "-ness" naturalizes everything that it touches to an innate characteristic.
so. the question of a knife would be: in relation to what? "what does a knife that cuts butter look like?"
and then the evaluation of butter: what makes it cleave apart, change, what operations could be done onto it that would make [one formal pat of butter] => ??? => [two pats of butter]? temperature, thinness of knife relative to butter, etc. a thin surface or line. something hot. a hot wire. heated butter knifes, wire cutter, heated wire cutters. a knife, in relation to butter.
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yet something doesn't yet quite sit well with this evaluation, either. are all tools in relation to a specific result? yes. how specific do you get a tool? if it can cut butter, can it cut clay? tofu? steak? one of those things is not like the other. how do you understand how many things something can cut? on one hand you accept the tool as created out of a relationship with another object that it acts upon. on the other hand you try or attempt to have it affect multiple things at once.
what is inverse of dali's paranoiac-criticality? the abject non-linkage of everything entirely. if one abandons taxonomy (as one should, in my opinion) and pursues networks, groups, black boxes, momentary abstractions, encapsulation (ala OOP), then when are things every linked? all networks analyzed according to shared identities. "after all, we all agree on the definition of an apple." but what for you is an apple may be, for the biologist, the physicist, the grocer, the supply chain manager, the commodities trader, the insurance risk evaluator, the doctor, the cook: a fleshy ovary containing seeds, an inspiration for gravity, a commodity, a unit of flow, a unit of trade, a percentage of spoilage, a dietary supplement, a culinary ingredient.
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so there's more. how more is the world constituted? what are its other structures?
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back to direction, orientation. movement. one does what one does. sometimes this appears to be withdrawal. other times this tastes like pursuit. one can only hope that the activity of one's being is to emerge out of a cavern, kid covered with dirt and shit and shining sludge, to proudly share the results of one's discovery: a specifically interesting rock, or a snail with an interesting shell. both discovery and sharing originating out of one's own delight. the enthusiastic or neutral or feigned-interest of reception ("hm, very interesting.") be damned. nothing happens when you're not covered in sludge, digging for yourself.