in this moment what is clear and lies bare? what is present? what emerges, already?

I keep on thinking about Latour's comment on scale; that, in actor-network theory, scale is not a function of size, but of networkedness; imagining all of the myriad lines extending out of something, a many-spoked point operating at some kind of scale that seeks to shape and alter us. walking through architectural drawings I see an attempt to describe an indescribable, to articulate the future by what is made visible. will a big future look big, they ask, and drawings at scale seem to attempt towards it; a big future, a big drawing, some kind of manifestation in the structures that surround us. a building is a manifestation, they exhort, and so this building will change the world.

or a building is a seed, a germination of a thought, the originating point of a system, and its spatial qualities will reverberate inevitably

or a building is part of a cybernetic loop, etc etc blah blah, all part of some chaotic difficult system,

or there's: life as part of this building, the way a river moves the earth, are you a whitewater rafting guide? a kayakist? a swimmer? a river designer? do you celebrate it, or do you seek to change it? what gives, what gives, what gives

are you looking for the big changes in your life? or are you looking for what's important at scale, and thus might be miniscule, may not even be visible, let alone drawn on twenty four by thirty six?

and if so, where does this lead you?

--

to some extent, the answers are clear. what's always been present is this kind of celebration of this meandering pondering. a celebration of these things perhaps worked in that discipline because it was precisely about a traversal of scales, from the detail to the urban plan, a zoom in and out and in, and that's what this kind of thinking allowed, while it did. but the answers, they are more complicated, it turns out, about the electricity running through the world, the force that is the force, of reverberations. why are you here, I want to ask these young-faced kids rolling around on these steps. why are you here, someone else probably wants to ask me. and so the questions I ask of others are the questions I ask myself.

at some point in the past I said:

"in ten years this will all have been hazy memory. in ten years I will chuckle to myself and recognize the same patterns, and I would have just have told myself to make something and be proud of it, to flex my muscles and feel the fibers firing, to know the joy of articulation, description, thought, system, and creation, to make and to make and to make. calculus integration is the technique of aggregating mathematically minuscule areas under the curve in order to find the total area. everything ever made is also an aggregation of the epsilon, the minuscule, the little sliver of x that is multiplied, added over a series of time and space in order to get somewhere. the epsilon of the evolution of a biological species is the genetic mutations that occur of the copying-over of chromosomes. action generates, generates, generates error and thus new value. make and make and make and eventually add it all together."

and was I wrong? was I wrong, dear lover, dear self? was I wrong?

--

what I think my task is now, is to move into fear, to understand my fears, my fear of fear, my avoidance of avoidance, to live with it, to move with it. when I expected to be lonely in the desert, I have found beauty and unexpected friendship. what might happen if I expected to hold fear? if I'm just slightly terrified, to an extent?

and again (what is this wisdom from my past? that rings true, over and over?):

If there's anything to be learned it's that the world is big --

-- but no really, seriously, it is very very big; it is more vast and more varied than you could ever imagine it to be; and you will grow to 'understand' it soon but will travel again one day and will realize, once more again, that it pushes beyond the edges of your understanding. If there's anything to be learned it's that it is easy to fall back into myopic positions of complacency, worrying, competition, self-comparison, where the real challenge is in the long run, with one's own being. That this is all but momentary, but what is as concrete as concrete can be are the small nonverbal material things: the gesture of an old woman wiping a table, a glass of tea being poured, the involuntary outward sigh after the first bite of food, the contorted wince when pain strikes a body, the elongation of time when one is sick or hurt, the slippage and transience of memory, and all the other things that find their origin in the body and grow outwards from it. And if you ever forget these things, or stop viscerally understanding that the world is big, then you need to travel (alone) again, and rediscover and remember and remember.