is the equator a he

centrifugal question not even posed but deduced from the prompt for last night’s sculpture class, which was to capture the form of a distended water balloon in terracotta. the teacher said something about drawing a line from the balloon back to the Renaissance masters, and Reginald Marsh was connected to this, too, only when I went to Google him this morning I instead looked up the actor, Frederic March

scorched earth

when we stop tethering our "value" as people to interactions with others, so that the very concept of "worth"—what Joan Didion considered "self-respect", and Toni Morrison examined in her final writings on "self-regard"—is detached from the ways that they leave us or we leave them—when we are able to finally dissipate the heavy weight of conditioning and projection through a gathering-in of essence that is as much a puzzle as a practice, we are also, fundamentally, buckling down on our bones. beginning again from ground-level, we are asking our bones to be strong enough to support us, to facilitate a full plasticity of self as we retool its musculature. we are asking the osseous to serve as subjectivity’s pliant anchor and physical source. in reaching for a root, we hope to transcend external substantiation, ditch the mirror, abandon those places where we go for comfort that we know are not forever. bones, of course, have a timescale more eternal than our economized thinking can induct on its own. so we must be patient with the secretive forces of the skeletal.

that being said, I am sick of my skeleton’s deterministic, dharmic casing: sick of explaining away my losses, failures, and disappointments as necessary, of having to accept, because it really is truth, that the thing that I believed I desired was not ultimately in my interest, or mandatory to my success, and that its denial, while painful, is appropriate, even fortunate. as we turn inwards for guidance, as we arrive at higher needs by stripping away our surface wants, the question arises of what to do with the temporal world we have just ejected ourselves from, but that remains within view. in our new state of "congruence", how should we treat those things (persons, objects, narratives) in which we no longer seek validation but have perhaps kept around, with the permanence of battle scars, for apotropaic solace? there often remains a tinge of doleful fidelity to that which we hold responsible for provoking our withdrawal from attachment, as if the fact that we can navigate a minefield of triggers with dexterity makes it neutral, safe and sound. yet even the most well-tuned mind can swell reflexively at the first sign of friction, for that sign will activate the larger matrix of our interpersonal impressions. experiences are inevitably undergone with only certain pieces of information accessible—so when their layers have been revealed and defused, how do we relate to them from a more "bone" perspective? 

bone being terra, we have the option of going "scorched earth". singeing one's territory to ensure that whatever it might bear can no longer be of use to us, so as not to be useful to an adversary on approach, is a storied military tactic illustrated in a literal, elegiac sense across Anselm Kiefer's Holocaustal landscape paintings. Kiefer sets fire to his native German turf to combust the possibility of conquest, even as generations after might re-seed it with hope. Leaving a Doll's House (1996), Claire Bloom's famous account of her marriage to Philip Roth, is probably the classic example of a "scorched earth" memoir. in this real-life counterpart to the fictional book that Meryl Streep's liberated lesbian releases about her ex-husband (Woody Allen) in Allen's film, Manhattan (1979), English actress Bloom dismantles the superlative and self-controlled veneer of Roth the artist by profiling the unctuous duplicities of Roth the man. reviewers thought that Bloom—who at her prime starred as another "shrewish" matron in the 1980s TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited—was far too generous to Roth; they wondered why she stayed with him for so long: in her marriage and in her recollections of it. for even as the book's publication unleashed a torrent of ill-will from its subject, Bloom could have skewered him further. why did she make excuses for his ugliest behavior? 

Bloom's light touch, her choice to sear but not char Roth’s authorial image, reminds me that Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning was a "scorched earth" gesture, of closing out with a transformative holding. the younger artist's torch-act, or negating excision, reduced his predecessor's imprint to pencil pentimenti, but not, or not just, to clear the way for his own work. for Rauschenberg as for Bloom, his artwork was the scorching’s negation of all but the intrinsically visible. what survives conflagration must be bone-deep, innate to the dynamic at hand—and not yet ready to go any farther. likewise, when Kiefer presents the fields of Eastern Europe as bloodied, with a pittance of beauty for its ash-remnants, he is restricting the beautiful to the bounds of his image; it would be too soon to give that beauty free rein. scorching is a razing of that which is closest to you, what you took for yours. I see it as a means of claiming autonomy by laying the contents of that claim corpselike, out in the open. no one who crosses your path, threatening incursion, can till for their benefit what you have sacrificed from your preexisting order. scorching is the deliberate spoliation of what once cropped up as nourishment and a curtailing—for a period—of all that might still grow. we choose to scorch so that the choice and the domain of choosing is ours, alone. 

this parching of past and present primes the earth for future construction, once it has been restored to the individual's orbit—your bones. the fact that there can be no sweetness, no fruit, borne from an immediate attempt at post-scorch flourishing helps to succor the frustrating amenability of a determinist outlook. if the determinist model posits that events happen for a reason, scorching ensures you are responsible for that event's corrosion, and that its grander reasoning culminates only on your terms. idioms like arte povera or Chinese architecture (Yuanmingyuan) avail ruin and desiccation as found material, a creative strategy that, in our century of surplus stimuli, has become an artistic first principle. but scorching does not reward casual something-from-nothing synthesis as mere transmutation; it defines transmutation through the patient anticipation of a "rightful" return. Rauschenberg played the long game against Ab-Ex, leaving us as his descendants to wait out the re-flowering of what in it was good. the laws of nature mandate that destruction beget the new: that, after nuclear explosion, terra eventually buds, and that even those bones caught in crematoria recompose into form. inside fires set and fires endured, between scorching and recomposition, those bones will be your home.

picture: Thy Golden Hair Margarethe, Kiefer, 1981.

train song

 so good I am getting rather bored of it.

the greatest thing

 

Cora p.

exiting my building around four pm on Thursday I go with Emilia to drop off her resume at the Bode cafe and to see the Cora Pongracz exhibition at Essex St. gallery (which is on Hester). 

downstairs in the display room, we stop for a while beside one of Cora's less memorable photographs, of a pedestrian or an object, a window maybe. I recall it being installed near an interstice where two walls open into the gallery's back office. such that when I began to feel conscious of our conversation rising to graze the ceiling's audial springboard, I stepped sideways and peeked behind this gap to see if anyone was there to monitor us. 

in storytelling—say, in Borges—the sideways shuffle has a particular purpose: it propels a character out of mundane expectations, into a more tenuous, suspenseful domain entirely at the whim of the author. there, the writer can fully show his hand, introducing to the plotline a twang of the auspicious, peculiar, and even humorous—all deliberate. I was reminded of this technique of the potentiating lapsus yesterday evening as my mother recounted a favorite incident from her medical training. making her rounds in the old country's hospitals, she would pull back a curtain to find kaffeeklatsches of doctors whiling shift time shoveling melon and cottage cheese in their mouths. 

to my mother, the cottage cheese gatherings betrayed the old country's culture of indulgence and inefficiency. but she also understood them, in transpiring literally behind the veil of normalcy, to represent that society’s aura of magical dysfunction, dyspeptic surrealism. it never occurred to me to connect the fact of having listened to her relay this story frequently as a child with the good many lunch periods I dedicated after leaving home to mulling over ergonomic comestibles as an aesthetic genre. I spent my late teens studying the clerking classes of Central London as they converged on Pret and LEON and Itsu—and other stores seasoned soul-numbing "fast casual". I wondered if and how hurried shop patrons, myself included, might ever initiate a sideways step, or pull back a curtain, to subvert their scheduled pockets for refueling and embrace a more phantasmic narrative. (that was what I liked in the work of Mika Rottenberg—who was then having a survey at Goldsmiths CCA).

but at Essex on Thursday it was too late in the afternoon and my shuffle need not hasten an escape from the everyday, seeing as my everyday is, now, a point of passage for energies in culture, my artistic duty being to conduct and translate air-current sent through my studio’s wind tunnel. when, for a brief second, I met the eyes of the gallery back chamber's scrivener-occupant, he wasn't eating anything but concentrating on his computer. ("quiet quitting" has come to an abrupt conclusion; everyone is doing their best to avoid the catching cold of layoffs). we would have to leave the peculiar twang of excursive discovery to Cora's pictures. 

here is what Emilia and I talked about, standing before them:

in tacit comparison with the gallery's soundscape, Emilia describes my apartment and its balcony studio as an airport-like vortex, always carrying a low din, full of treehouse noises. I tell her I call it a wind tunnel, and as if to excuse the positive nature of something under my care but for which I cannot take credit, I say, I’ve never known another kind of living besides in urbanity, where there is always lots happening, or always lots for me to channel, like: may I put you through to…I conjure the woman phone-operator of yore. I ask her what it’s like in Indiana, if it's quiet where she comes from, and she says that in her hometown, instead of New York's imposed clamor, stimulation is something to actively seek out, that she was always seeking out things by which to be distracted in the outdoor environment, in whatever was local. (I think of how you see the pursuit of distraction-via-surfeit here in domestic ostentation, in elite enclosure, where stuff is not to see but to have; in the fridge-stocking sacramental equivalents to des Esseintes' encrusted turtle—another topic, altogether).

Emilia says that this search for stimulation in the Midwest, and everywhere, is all cope. that our existence is cope, that we run on cope cope cope, pumping the noiseless through empty stomachs with more noise. I imagine us filling our vase-vessels with filler flowers, and say, I think I wrote about this somewhere, only to see when I pulled up the document that I had made a slightly different point, both the converse of and complimentary to hers. I had swapped cope as a practice for "blip" as an experience, arguing for the blip's importance as something that acts upon, that happens to you, versus the cope's call to engagement, willed yet unfortunate. I show her the relevant excerpt: [discussing a painful experience...] suffering is so much blip—ultimately, everything blip. Life, for most, being a seesaw between blips you make it past and blips you carry somewhere on your person, blips you can’t let go of so they are subsumed into your mass…

then, readying to leave the gallery, we pause at the staircase’s threshold to jointly contemplate a perfect 1964 Untitled image by Cora, a compound of our twin theories. in it, a girl's elbows sit like pillars on her knee-pedestals, the remainder of her body cut off, a de-sexed Venus de Milo (another favorite of my mother's). her figure is a trunk, she has both sustained an encounter (blip) and responded to it (cope)—in her abstracted self, holding her own weight, but also outwardly, by facing us.

loam (ad copy)

people are fighting terribly over earth when they will soon be surfing water. people are interested in suffixes, people are observing of arcs altogether too obvious. what I find of interest is the possibility that an apotheosis of the suffix is a means of belying or perhaps even intentionally safeguarding the fact that we are in a great state of prefix. it is always nice to see such sleights of apprehension made operative in language.

as for personal matters: yesterday afternoon my friend Emilia came by my house and sat for a while with a vase of daisies on the table. I told her I bought them at the start of this week to usher in new beginnings, which are symbolized by daisies as death-harkening. (this was something I remember learning early on as a child, passing Pushing Daisies posters graffiti'd in the subway, wondering what was going on in this ModCloth elysium sitcom, which naturally had an air of the unreal about it). after she left, I drew the Death major arcana card in the Trusted Tarot iPhone app. 

Emilia says I subsist on daisy petals and homeopathic purplish vials. maybe so, or at least whatever I subsist on is the Narcissus (daffodil) mirror-image of certain commercials (BetterHelp, "Press Play" spots from Gilead for HIV drugs). 

I miss the very tender, ethereal Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume ads from the early 2010s, many of which have, over the years, been scrubbed from the internet. their gentle tone of pubescent anomie endures in certain online fashions, much the way Viktor & Rolf flower bomb scent strip emissions stick around long after their magazine tacks have been lifted. yet while the original Daisy branding was nourishing and life-giving in its pared-down, light-washed delicacy, its most recent fall 2020 update seems all too saturated: the sky too blue, the grass too green, too Sound of Music teletubby in its messaging—having been released amid our forced embrace of virtuality. in general, commercials, and many other forms of media, have always dogged the living with ambient death; we experience them like hangovers, simulating fast decline into senescence. heightened tolerance encourages thirst and prolongs wear-off. thus I try to make a regular practice of the over-sensory hang-over's ascetic transmutation, wherein surrender to deathly ambience becomes Quantum Awareness. an epiphysis (pineal gland) ignited with multiplicities of virtualized or physically encased energy can, in the moment of encounter, be simultaneously turned towards nature: brushing through a meadow of daisies, as husks of all that is both infinite and temporary.

also, on Wednesday, standing with Emilia on the roof of the Swiss Institute during a torrential rainstorm I referred to some other Aquarian age ideas concerning individual versus collective imprinting. when we went to dinner afterwards she venmo'd me with the tagline "Aquarium" which I thought was hilarious, because I had been fantasizing that morning about ditching everything to visit the Aquarium on Coney Island—like I did as a kid and like Julia Roberts on her lunch-break in Closer (2004), when Jude Law tricks Clive Owen into meeting her there. Closer is a movie about internet connectivity, miserable romance, uneven artistic passion, and Americans in London, meaning it's a movie I know how to make, but wouldn't or haven't yet. 

now it is Friday, day seven of a candle ritual I have been performing. the candle will rest til burn-out on the counter opposite the daisies, opening roads, I hope for the best.

third-eye cubby corner

If you go down to Hammond

You’ll never come back…

Generous, sensual, even when aggressive: I am still not a person of scruples. Yet you will rarely see this manifest anywhere but in art, as in: writing allows me to cheat. To cheat at prose by taking off…the deadbeat dad of definition, explication, clarity. She renounces responsibility to structure for the wilds of illimitable play being the gist of what my eighth-grade science teacher noted regarding my baroque style of lab report. He told my parents that I described dissecting worms with the lexical élan of Daphne du Maurier novels. What they did with this information was enroll me in more worm dissecting classes. My worms were, like Daphne’s, humans and decaying social tissue. Placing each subject on a neutral glass slab, I would dismember it for parts unspoken.

So you see how…running multiple fronts of linguistic devilment we may bestow reality on the irreal barbs that otherwise pepper only our mostest intimacies. Writing allows me to cheat myself out of an awareness of all which has been said since word began…to stave off the scurrying rats of redundancy along the backroads of Just do with shadow puppets of my own largess…And in doing so, even coming somehow to tolerate the reviled selfsin of words reused on accident, for here, in the clearing…in the "second place" created by language…I may walk the streets possessed, a dog leashed to one wrist and a device in the other hand typing worldblind into [app] because word has come and to it alone I must attend.

xerosis

I saw one painting at an opening tonight that touched me, it was a work on wood sequestered in a vitrine at the back of the gallery, it shows a woman's torso with her tunic descending from her breasts, a strap hits her shoulder, in false modesty, enjoying the solitary caress, just beneath her clavicles, a set of manicured white nails holds the shirt fabric to her chest, an image that overlays cellular formations resembling xerotic tattoos, which gird the figure's dingily lacquered skin as the crackling substrate seeps through, and above these two layers the woman is bleeding out again, blood-letting droplets of umber-colored glue that have dried molten across the surface instead of disappearing like dew, mid-flight, a nun on the run, a Magdalene-Piéta with applique tears. 

Eartha, Nan, Nico

Someone sent me a copy of the 1995 documentary on Nan Goldin, I'll Be Your Mirror. I wasn't expecting much, and loved it very. Not even because of Nan, whose voiceovers are austerely singleminded, she does that photographer thing of presuming assent and lunging right at you—but for the fierce, warm matrix that her work stitches. Nan’s photographs famously encompass the lives of friends, lovers, collaborators. Their pictorial inscription has to be fierce, in that Nan is designed, at least she was back then, on taking life to its edge, and there, halting death. As anti-death votives, her artworks make a trade with time: they enshrine singularity and beauty in interpersonal enmeshment. They seem to say: enmeshment is okay if those involved are also suffering solitarily. The conceit of Nan's oeuvre is that it is willing to baldly, openly negate that which lies beyond her participation—in her sanctuary in-between of life and death, she owns specificity, relaying pathos almost by happenstance. The film is titled of course after a Velvet Underground song delivered by Nico and the soundtrack throughout echoes Nan’s artistic imperative, that, in a state of warbled before and after "maths", she doesn’t have to trust the world, just to reflect it back. The documentary ends with Eartha Kitt singing All By Myself / Beautiful at 40, which is how Nan shows herself and her subjects, sloshed at parties or stoic at funerals, very alive, gripping to life, and, in an important sense, alone.

break the

Navigating certain heartbreaks, it is normal to think in nevers, like never again is now.

But when you are breaking in slow motion, such that the true rift between cycles is perceptible but not yet now, when it is both apparent that a break has transpired, passed you by, a silent cudgel for your growth, and also, as far as time is concerned, has still not made its final approach…that is the sort of occasion when you might be inclined to listen on repeat to The Chain, yes Fleetwood Mac, yes a late 70s LOL but so what—it works, humming

You will never love me again to yourself walking back from an opening at Artists’ Space one Friday evening spent among old and almost friends; or humming it on the escalator down to Trader Joe’s; or in the shower, making the Janet Leigh Psycho face, the face of feminine fear as it curdles into despair—if only it would curdle into rage. 

Because, to invoke situationally helpful Human Design verbiage, not-love in the now means Not-Self ever after. And if adulthood is about at least feigning an attempt to be congruent with one’s essence, while our chains can indeed crack open on their own—because life, if you ask for it, is quick to give you space, to free up personal expression—nevertheless, breakage is a rite of performance as you alone define it. 

The chain in need of breaking presents you with a dharmic quest, asking whether you are willing to detach from others, and therein, from time itself...For some of us, this is more an issue of mechanics, as in

How to unchain? 

Here is one strategy that I have learned: you place that which is encumbering on a separation rose and send it out into ether, encased in golden light. The light then streams back in your direction, to glaze and repair your individuated aura. Eventually you begin to do this reflexively, every day honing your private glaze, coming into further, flowered alignment.

Or you could try the Stevie and Fleetwood template of rhythm and word: as their song suggests, those who proffer not-love are bound to wall themselves in with wills or woulds. But once they have decided your chains are theirs in concept and not theirs in feeling...you must accept that, too, as yours in choosing…and assimilate its consequences. 

For your cords are your cords, your love is your love: precious, power straight from source. To bolster this power, to feed from it, we avail boundaries and cut-off points. We retract and reach out and regroup as necessary. Life comes to a head and so, in parallel fixation, we stand, peering past our reflections in the water, we send ripples through the pond, we initiate the chain, nature furnishes it with length and weight, we are innocent no longer, we cast the first stone, we wait for a response.

Above: the late Anne Heche as Janet in Gus Van Sant’s frame-by-frame Psycho  remake from 1998, the year before I was born.

don't they know

About the sun that goes on shining and the birds that go on singing and the sea that continues its rush towards the shore, Julie London is quizzical. She wonders, like Kirsten Dunst’s Justine in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, lolling about in her stupefied Sight: why has seemingly nothing changed, how don't they know...it is so clear that the world is over, and the reason the world is over, well...

it ended when I lost your love. 

Like von Trier's film, London's The End of the World (released 1963) is but one entry in the sizable annals of heartbreak art and the eschatology of love—a bit much to contend with for a single Sunday evening. Nevertheless, a couple of fly-by notes, after listening this morning to London's lucent, mesmeric singing...

Melancholia (2011), a world-ending movie, contours the loss of life through that which orbits and constrains love—marriage and family and sacrifice. These are values quick to fade or self-immolate in the face of irrevocable conclusion, so that what is left to accompany an ending—to handhold in cessation—is sight: a seeing of doom-to-come that is mediated through love. London, by contrast, is losing not life but love, a loss she sees through a world-ending that has not yet happened, that will not happen, even as it should.

For both London and Justine, what hurts most is to look on all that has not yet fallen away once a fall has been decreed, it hurts to feel a total ending well before you will stop breathing.

Does London want to stop breathing? Yes, and no; she is more so surprised by the fact she still is, that her body has not yet caught up to her emotional decimation. She does not ask big questions, like whether sense and soma are indeed separate, or what bearing subjectivity has on other people; instead, she makes big assumptions. Her whys take responsibility for an unseen destruction...conjecturing that if, in the semantic fluidity of cosmic knowledge, "world" equals "love", a rejection of love is a rejection of world-being...so that a single goodbye must have the power to dissolve life itself. 

But what kind of life, and whose world? Human, animal? Is love necessary to the existence of either—as London discovers, seemingly not. Both nature and body persist (with impunity!) in their resilience, ignorant of or else simply indifferent to her loss.

So we beat on...

My father likes to say, love the world and it will love you back. Easy, simple Noahide love creates an ark in time, but cataclysms dent and compress time, calling for, as Bracha Ettinger has termed it, trust after the end of trust. This trust is synthetically generated by Justine in her family’s final hours and London is practicing a version of it, too. The endurance she encounters in her surroundings and in herself serve to further her trust, as evidence of an autopilot continuity that at once painfully contradicts her innate truth—her experience of ending—and offers a way out of its world-shaped wound. 

Re-romancing a world she regards as loveless, London's observations of nature are remnant survivors that she polishes with song. If she seeks in them assurance of the ability to imperviously carry on, these external variables—sun, sea, birds—are also where she diffuses her half of lost love.  One of the guiding tenets of the creative is that tragic rupture is exalted by reconstructive transmutation. Violation renders the personal project of love universally potent. So that there, in art or nature, love isn’t really over, is it?

Von Trier knew to retain his organic background elements til the film’s coda—that the humming CGI birds and the swaying CGI branches should be the very last to go, because they, and whatever whispers through them, are the harbingers of all love, as channels for making and remaking—for real and life-preserving communion. They soar and circle overhead as Justine and her family brace themselves for death, holding hands at this ending of ends. The birds and branches tell us:

Love is everywhere, it is already gone.

Johnny Guitar!

hatchlings

Describing the theatrical experience in notes for her late drama, Venice Saved, the philosopher Simone Weil states that an event, whether located in an image or "on the stage", transpires through "the slow maturation of a deed, with the universe around it—then the deed is hurled into the world". Like a hatched sea turtle heading for ocean, an action begins with a waddle across warm sand, and then, a subtle violence…as the tide catapults the deed into reception.

So rumbles from the stippled muqarna of the unfinished angel, the band-aided Self: that the port-of-call where "universe" gives way to "world", has, today, been closed; there is now little difference between the domain that engulfs an action—from the first ujjayi undulation—and those infinite waves into which we might throw it.

This new framework flips Weil's slow to fast tempo: things happen quickly, yet quickly and without end. For instance, an injurious side-effect of modern resort zoning is that commercial lighting and beachside activity disorient turtle hatchlings as they make their nighttime forays towards the water. Instead of hewing to a clear path, the migrating hatchlings become distracted and offtrack, they circle themselves on the beach, unable to find bottom.

Hatchlings are defined by the fact of their birth. To be born is to leave, or else be "hurled", from an egg. The recent waterfront development crisis lends the turtle birth as departure cycle a samsaric eternality, as action, context, and consequence exist in unitary synthesis. To the confused baby animal, the beach has Saharan proportions, the sand goes on and on until it fills up with their death; or else, if they are lucky enough to be collected by the water, the unbounded ocean sweeps them into death's mirrored infinity: the long aquatic life for which their species was intended.

In either case, though, the change in pacing is clear, as is the fact that for us, as for these turtles, survival is not guaranteed; the immediacy of a circumstance is, and so is its endlessness.

My parents' generation, X, that according to the still-hegemonic historiographies (in desperate need of rewriting) came of age first with The Brady Bunch, and then with Nirvana, is in a curious position of having witnessed the endless begin. They are hinged between two paradigms for measuring behavior in time—the timescale Weil describes, of slow-to-fast activity, versus what Virilio, Land, the turtle kingdom, and nearly every recent commentator models as fast-to-infinite valences. X is a generation of a stochastic flux, that endures quite like driftwood, stripped down from early yuppie enthusiasm to resigned listlessness, its members washing up at random and able, in the range of their exposure, to offer less security-in-time than informed opinions on it. 

Here is an excerpt from a Gen X "offspring", Mike White's Enlightened (2011), that has languished happily on the shorelines of cultural confusion, being so coyly particular, or as some pundits have put it, "hard to market", as to lie low in a kind of passive prescience: the giant turtle hallucination scene from the very first episode, that reads like a mashup of the Nature Channel and the Nevermind album cover.

A homage to the "world turtle" (Akūpāra, Lenape) mytheme—that so enchanted me as a child—it's also a good way to kick off a show that builds on the related "turtles all the way down" principle, as its waylaid hatchling protagonist—arrested in her spiritual "rebirth"—ambles ungratefully through her own hall of mirrors, with each discovery, each action, enclosing another sorry consequence...slow, fast, and ceaseless.

oh, to be a house

I am intent on becoming a house. Because, as a healer I work with explained to me earlier today, you can’t stab a house! You can toss a knife in its general direction, but it will only appear flimsy and ineffectual. Any weapon, verbal or sentimental, will bounce off the sturdy defenses of a structure that stands centered, assured in its foundations. 

We might picture a strong house, a fortified container, as being made from concrete or metal. There is a question of whether it should be windowed or closed-off like a camera obscura—but as long as there is outer definition, inner vision will follow. Anyway, I, for one, would rather be a Lina Bo Bardi aperture than a Peter Eisenman living tomb. 

We know from Bachelard that houses are entities, deeply particularistic and also thoughtlessly everyday. We would do well to be careful about them. We can think of our souls as resting inside a temporarily, "this life" sited Self. In facing those drawn to us like karmic pilgrims, we have an opportunity to learn who or what we wish to invite into the sanctity of dwelling.

Have you seen our house? 

The 80s Britpop classic, Our House, by MADNESS, has been on my mind for months. Only now do I feel like I have a decent understanding as to why it has surfaced: because I have been moving between houses both "ours" and "mine", surveying their contents, attempting to cement clean borders between my individual essence and that of the pulsating "ley lines" that trail across my outer world. Essence can mean more or less receptivity to such pulsations, for in the process of summoning and honing an inner authority, the young person begins to rework, or else totally clean out, their identity's many possible residences, re-establishing its tiers and bounds, converting given into chosen terms. 

This is a regular maintenance job (part of what some call "energetic hygiene") that has, for me, signified a leap into adulthood. Such reflections often involve a sense of exhaustion or overwhelm in unwilling exchanges with others; further awareness brings lightness and release, as in the old "it could be worse" folktale about an overcrowded farmstead. Left open to anyone, the psychic abode can be quickly filled with busied projections of activity—the shadow puppets of external desires—that remind me of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's exhibition design for a Pierre Chareau furniture retrospective some years ago, animating tables and lamps with silhouettes of imaginary human users. Their aim was to make Chareau's furniture "come alive", as if in museal stasis it is otherwise deadened. Yet in static, is there not also prudent grace? In the end, the levitating images can always withdraw from orbit. We alone are core. 

There are several ways to approach solidification. I very much like that of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, telling the story of Vasalisa and Baba Yaga—with her infamously avian house—in Women Who Run with the Wolves (1989). Or how, in the "grounding" tab of her saved Instagram Stories, the Breathwork practitioner Erin Telford shares what her mobile, "digital nomad" lifestyle has taught her: that she is her own ultimate home...Corny, but at least she is certain. It is not necessarily easy to merge hovering spirit with the soma of being-house—it sometimes feels like taking an overly curious child who wandered off in the park back to their panicking mother. So this subject is one I am constantly revisiting—the child must be "found" and "returned"—and will probably discuss again later on. 

In the interim, some more visual references:

Loewe x Howl's Moving Castle collaboration, announced earlier today, a Baba Yaga homage

Dakota Johnson's iconically candid Architectural Digest house tour, ca. March 2020 

Kim Kardashian having three different pewter grey lip balm holders in one room of her house 

the esoteric "Magic Square" teachings of Katonah Yoga (Nevine Michaan) 

the house at the heart of The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) 

the encyclopedic particularity of Sir John Soane Museum, London, where I used to go to feel less bizarre myself

in power

in power, the struggle for security. 

I'm the first to confess that I have minimal patience for the body of literature that we know as "science fiction"—having decided as a child (perhaps mistakenly, I have been told) that it was, overall, too pragmatic for my taste, too invested in construction yet, unlike comparable Futurist writing, apathetic to the ribbed skin of language itself. Science fiction seemed to me then a conduit to illumination designed for the mechanical reader, who is only too happy watching the dually-versed writer use the unholy utensils of the technic to rake the mystic's holy ground. Meanwhile, the seeds of a text’s more poetic revelations would inevitably grow moldy in the dark freeze of its life as lesson plan, being so often taken for instructive moral fable rather than as prophesy of promised lands. 

In time I've come to appreciate exceptions to these framing conditions in the work of Calvino, or Delany, or Le Guin, but even in those exceptions there arises the issue of fixing to speech imperatives not yet ready to be physically meted out, and that feel perhaps too elusive to be so crisply written down. The world will takes its time incorporating them. It is this discomfiting nature of articulation in contingency, amidst the ambiguities of a pending future-present, that keeps the conceptually open-ended but descriptively definitive "genre" conventions of science fiction both necessarily protective of new ideas, and also frustratingly intelligible. 

Proceeding in this vein, it seems accurate to observe that Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971) is a popular but still underrated book, and a lucid, fittingly "predictive" representation of some essential "brain century" questions: 

What constraints should we place on cerebral consciousness, once we are able to diagram and harness its transmutative plasticity? Are there bureaucratic terms that we must give, or will be compelled to give, to energetic instantiation, to "govern" the "ungovernable" channels inside ourselves? Who has ownership over these channels' subtle, and cellular, direction?

Lathe can be an unpleasant object, it possesses an external calm that renders it odorless, a thing full of dust bunnies and simultaneously, of peremptory logic. It is what, in my fondness for abstractions, I would call "confusingly clear". So Le Guin's gooseberry style is not mine, and when I initially encountered it I wasn't yet interested in the Tao Te Ching from which she derives each chapter's aphoristic subheadings, but nonetheless, the sketch of its plot—with EEG scanning technology, a doctor takes advantage of a patient's state of somnambulant creativity to remake the world—has stuck with me since before my senior year of high school, when it was assigned as summer reading. 

Lathe is about betweenness, and controlled betweenness. About dreaming as a means of separating and re-sequencing timescales and technically mediated recursion. It's about how human it is to introduce things to existence and then wish to retract them, overwhelmed by the many valences of actioned power, power you did not know was yours, or that you could refuse to be used for.

Power as potential energy, power as sovereign will. We are sovereign over what, now? We are sovereign over however far we allow our consciousness to extend—over what we let in, and what we let out—goes the general dictate. But even in serving as mere cover, a blunt tool for that greater, hidden theme, "allow" is a complex verb, and it gets at the complexity of individual psychic permission as it conjuncts with the collective field.

Last night, I watched a recording from a teacher in which she says something like, if you think the idea of twin souls came from Plato, I can't w/ you. Meaning that twin souls is a concept integrated by Plato for human comprehension but one that was already circulating in the ether, and that might have been conveyed via any number of arbitrary messengers. Messengers are doodle-jumpers, they reach up, up, up—far into the sky—to grab at passing transmissions; through modes of translation like philosophy or simple metaphor (doodle jumping par example), or evidently, Le Guin's science fiction, a transmission becomes widely legible as "concept". 

What keeps me curious, what I continue to play at, is less the ability to grab a concept, and bring it "down" to us—something that will come naturally to more and more people over our lifetime—than the forced dichotomy that follows, the fallacy of security in power that Lathe's doctor and patient are fighting over. 

Whomever lays claim to integration will have to develop a daily practice of facing its consequences. Existence assumes shape at the frequency where lathe (resources, materials, the human as instrument) and heaven (higher order) meet. Knowing you are a person of that frequency can be slightly destabilizing—given all that you are called on to stabilize. It entails a certain kind of harmony between yes, the scientific and the fictive; the messenger and his message. To cite Abbey Lincoln's "magic words", we need both a hand to rock the cradle, and a hand to help us stand, twin poles unto themselves.

unfortunately (a template beleaguered)

as an artist there are some things you cannot say. such as, give me the simple life. 

To be precise:

I don't believe in frettin' and grievin';
Why mess around with strife?
I never was cut out to step and strut out.
Give me the simple life.

There are artists who try to live simply, and yes, maybe that works. "Office artists" for one thing and artists with tidy wives. But in their psyches?

I suppose the song—to collapse song and singer—knows its thinking  wishful, too.

vandal-sandal

An element of vandalism or, ventilation. 

Genesee

a stray thought I collected from the ether. as if to whisper, hello pleasant valley, watch this space.

must stop collecting strays. m calls them "astral debris", low-level thoughtforms. instead, our internal trek bridge should say a clear No to the passing matter and certainly not match it, swiping X.

Genesee being an experiment in, I see you bait, and yet here you end. (experiment fails, discovers new illuminating affinities between me and It).

names

Asked for one at dinner (gf p. thai no tofu), I responded that my genderless (nonbinary) name would be 'Lou'. It came to me quickly.

Other names that were tossed around: jewel, puddles, mint, moss. Quandary/quagmire.

funny how talk of binaries evokes the things in life we hold most immediate but can forget are sacred puzzles, such as materials, senses, and problem sets. Lou is lucky to be reconfiguring all that jazz.

poodles

Today, at the bookshelf, fondled my copy of Ashbery's convex mirror. From the college years, though I can't really think of them like that.

Its orange spine is nearly all rubbed off. The pages are so uselogged I almost cut them up for scraps but the time and the place they got logged in are important to remember.

And while the actors practiced dropping their sibilant 's', I watched Lost Illusions (2021) and picked apart the dog's mats.

At first

At first this was a place of refuge, where I could speak openly, about life—mine, and in the place behind the veil.

But artworks always turn on you mid-making. Like us, they are young and they grow up. They insist on becoming themselves.