peripheral thoughts become central; central thoughts become peripheral. there's always a sliding in and out, a modification of priorities, desires, along a pattern that never makes sense in the moment and fits neatly in hindsight. ah, history, so seductive in its historicizing, messily yet coherent narratives that traject gorgeously the finitude of scattered arcs. constellations bring stars into meaning, lines making cars or giraffes out of connect-the-dots games. watch as coherence unfolds, see solidity pop out of thin air, gestalt dangling in front of your eyes. from where did this come? how did this snap together? we'll never know.

who makes new constellations? how do you reinvent the sky? what narratives warred, competed, survival of the fantastic-est, until ursa wins over other?

-

to watch my priorities (in the sense that I mean an ordering of questions (that I'm rolling around in my mind like a peach pit in my mouth, tumbling, nibbling at fraying fibers)) change is like doubling back a way you've already wandered to notice new things on the block that you hadn't before, or enjoying food that you had previously thought distasteful, or vice versa. have you changed? has the world changed? yes, and maybe, but it matter? are the questions the right ones? does it make any sense to have the world outside of you, and your wandering self a momentary addition onto a flat world? why are the limits of me inside my body?

I realize while I write these that they feel so absurd, or so flat, either with too much meaning or completely meaningless. like descriptions of a relationship, only understood from the inside, like descriptions of travel, only possibly empathizable from the location of the travel. it was amazing! you had to be there! I will try to describe to you where I went! or what I did! because how I felt or how I am altered is, I don't know, barely reachable with words that don't make sense. I would like to wrap this up in a bow and say that words are hard because, while traveling, I was in engaged in the task of becoming a different speaker, the words sliding away from underneath me without their original owner, like spacecraft escaping orbit only to realize that earth, too, is spinningly spinning on its own trajectory. sorry, this is what I got to do, see you later, voyager.

but.

clarity is to trust yourself, and to trust the direction that seems to arise. at some point, for some version of me, I could say that I believe in trades and practices.

-

or! to say what I really think! here we go, sick-haze fueling this exhortation:

I see trades and practices, and I am awed by their movement. I believe in cultures (the yogurt kind) and transmission, not transaction-oriented quota-based logic. I believe in the logic of positive feedback loops, and negative feedback loops, and the logic of material world, and think that the philosophical/logical structure of money has a lot to do with a whole slew of misunderstandings. the unconscious is a concept born out of an essence-oriented concept.

I distrust, or am perhaps too healthily skeptical of knowledge right now, or at least knowledge that does not change the way you act, knowledge that is not actionable on, knowledge that can not be proven wrong by action. not-falsifiable knowledge. and I recognize the extent to which this is driven by an eye-opening understanding of new processes outside the domain of my purview; processes unexpectedly driven more by emotion, people, the body, weather, of society, control, power, communication, words, and their slipperiness.

how do you incubate? how do you slowly acclimate? to be enculturated, reculturated, requires you to really be altered. to whom do we do so? and how?

why is concept paramount? the concept travels. the concept is memetic, operates like a flash, more like a cipher than a solid object. the concept is viral, literally, a small payload operating on a hugely complex system, a diff on your code. questionable whether it constitutes life on its own, but certainly modifying other organisms wholesale. the concept is wild. the concept moves like a flash. my concept becomes your concept becomes their concept. the concept is intoxicating.

(let's not trivialize the power of a shared intoxication. wars and truces were started over shared intoxications.)

but what's bacterial? what spreads slowly, accumulates, transforms? sourdougheal, kombuchaesque, yogurtful. shared but not memetic. practices. earthworms in soil. etc.