Browsings...

Syntax, structured coherencies, letting go to enter the streams-of-consciousness writing. But see how chromosomes are packaged. Tighter than any sonnet. We are form, and bound to form. Still, to untrain my mind, I allow emergences. We each experience the quality of the world differently, the qualia, but there are points, nodes, of happenings, in the world, in the event continuum, around which I gather my thoughts as I write this.

Browsing the news, I find a skeleton of pins, bars and a plate around Barbaro's leg, which is already held by a matrix of screws. The abscess, pummel of pus. Prize racehorse with a splintered leg. Laminitis. Later in the day, Barbaro is put down.

I'm reading Jean-Luc Nancy: "Isn't life always an escape from death? And this escape from death - which at the same time doesn't cease moving towards death, of course - which is it if not life itself..." "...it survives, that is, it is always on the escape, skimming non-existence, contingent..."

But my writing is full of grafts! Inserted into the landscape of soil-drenched words like the traces of a village found near Stonehenge.

And then this: "everything has the mark of its own disappearance." This phrasing, these words, their potential meaning, remain with me. I hover over them for a long time, writing them into my notebook, tracing them with my fingertips. Nancy says death is inevitable, we know that, it's just that when is unpredictable. Unless with drugs, like Barbaro, or euthanasia. Is the unpredictability of our disappearance marked on us?
The coleslaw is pale green and crunchy, tiny slivers of cabbage in a piquant dressing; I crave it when I see it. English cucumbers sliced on a diagonal, green and yellow wax beans, chickpeas, tiny diced red peppers, cherry tomatoes, a typically creamy potato salad, pickled sliced beets, and dressing, who knows what, perhaps a version of Italian. This, my small lunch from a salad buffet.

I am deep in an office tower of the corporate world. Outside of nature, here where death is remote, where it's dark beating wings are hidden. What's beating inside my head is monotony. Flourescent lights. A world in which there are no bodily fluids, no bodies with organs. A world of sheer surfaces, billboard women, men divided into one of two ranks: managerial or service. Or am I unfair?

Some scientists in Britain created a mechanical stomach that partially emulates the complexity of the chemical and muscular processes of digestion. It is of plastic and metal strong enough to hold the corrosive gut acids and enzymes. The scientists deliver foods to the mechanical stomach that even contracts just like a real one, and can even vomit, and watch the bile begin to dissolve everything into its constituents. The stomach isn't like a real one, which is beyond our ability to reproduce fully. Learning how our digestive systems work, especially the absorption of nutrients is the point of this digesting machine. Testing foods, antacids, even how poisons get absorbed, fascinating.

Back at the desk where I sit it's not as if I have anything important to do; they just need me here. Anyone. Someone who's good at the tasks. They don't even mind my writing, or me in the act of. Digesting.

Glint of the Green Cat's Eye

Embroidered flowers, relation to real-world flowers undetermined, perhaps fuchsia daisies and tawny buttercups and peach poinsettias. Thought is vision-based. It transforms through the insula, physical signals from the body, sensations into feelings. Neurocircuitry. I am a wired world. The sensitivity of the central nervous system transforms the world out there into the one in here. I perceive strokes of coloured yarn as flowers with indistinct reference to actual flowers dancing on hillsides of brown earth.

Head-strong, body-wise.

Information comes in so many ways.

Should I tell a story? That's a different shaping of events. Pick a narrative, a point of view. Paint representation in words. Describe a mutually-agreed upon approach to a scene.

On my finger is a thick silver ring set with a black stone in which there is a green cat's eye.

Carvings on a snake-shaped rock, arrow-heads 70,000 years old lying nearby, in a cave hidden in the "Mountain of the Gods" in Botswana. Offerings to spirit.

Anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa 120,000 years ago. Protozoa on the edge of the expanse. Passing the baton of chromosomes from generation to generation, sacred bundle.

The rock snake is 6 feet long with a gash that is mouth-like. It's carved notches appear to ripple in the light that flickers in the cave, making it undulate, alive.

Can I move from the mystery of the mountain cave to the one of the night sky of stars without connectives? The green cat's eye glints its visions.

It's what we can't see that negotiates us.

About the size of a small asteroid, all the dark energy in the universe. It's absolutely consistent, too, and doesn't clump or coagulate anywhere. Unimpeded surface, if you can imagine that. And it's shaping everything, not only how far we are moving from each other, but perhaps the structure of the evolution of the universe itself.

There is dark energy between you and me.

Oh, laugh. There isn't anywhere it doesn't penetrate. It's about the expansion rate. Be a magnet and it'll slow down. What we need to exert on each other are gravitational pulls.

The thread in the crudely embroidered flower on my sweater pulls. Pulls out, winding undone. A red lace of snake beneath my fingers. Or perhaps we are merely notches in the undulating cosmic serpent that is always shedding its skin, leaving skeins and webs of matter amidst the empty spaces.

One day I'll take you through a time sequence, and you'll understand the expansion and the gravitational fields, and the forces existing on nothing. To grow we have to push our gravity into the expanding fields of dark energy. That way we don't disperse.

Consciousness doesn't actually have an "I." That's a narratorial strategy we fabricate afterwards. Trouble is, there's no-one in charge, only neurolinguistic circuitries, insulas sparking feelings, a lightning energy of consciousness constantly recreating itself as we interpret ourselves in this vast place of fleeting planets and stars and galaxies, where no-one has the final word.

Flames of Insight Curling on the Edges of the Burning Paper

You create this writing. Yes, you do. I write the words, their coherencies dancing to my inner rhythms, but you create the meaning that the words impart. You, the reader, control my writing. Okay, that is going a little far, but I do write for your reading. When you completely miss the point of what I wrote I think it's me, not you. I wasn't clear enough; it's not that you have problems with comprehension, though in my darker moments I will admit I've thought this.

There are different groups of readers too. Who comprehend differently from each other. Offering your writing to different groups can be an interesting experience. But I won't get into that. Oh, and whoever leaves the first comment often defines how that piece will be interpreted and responded to. I often make it a point not to read the other comments until I've commented. I want a pure connection with the writing that doesn't need to line up with the 'group-think' because it's sure of itself. I personally like independently thought-out comments. On the other hand, when discussions get going, that's great too.

The comments often enable the next piece of writing. We are audiences, then, who shape each other's writing. It's reader-response carried to a newly imagined level, this critical approach to literature, but greatly speeded up in the blogosphere. The process of reception and meaning-making that enables the writing to live beyond the page it is written on.

Blossom

Should a flower not open to the sun because there is nightfall?

Should a flower, soft, delicate, trusting, not blossom magnificently, brilliant unfurling full petals, splashing perfume, colour to the world, inviting pollination, growing rich seeds for the future, pods full of grace, because the sun is swallowed up by darkness?

Outside, looking in.

Metaphors aren't arising. Something resists them. It's a constructed world that perhaps is a metaphor for its own processes. Of corporate wealth built on bodies of work. Of living off the crème of interest payments. Capitalism is "borrowing from the future."¹ These wide berths of marble pillars and floors and tabletops, of huge glass chandeliers and sophisticated stores, of pin stripe people, confident but wary, built on profits from debt payments. What enables one to have what one can't afford, now. Purchases contingent on future payments that gouge the paychecks of the present. A future that barely exists, or does as a distant phantom. All around me at the Food Court where I sip coffee and write in my notebook, not the upper echelons of power but office staff. Thin plastic credit cards already overloaded, mortgages, car payments. And a disjuncture in the metaphors of financial power that the structures are a concretization of. Profits from the excesses of the moneylenders practices, this glimmering, gleaming Mecca of wealth. What if we chose to live within our means - would corporate complexes of banks like those surrounding me vanish into the mirages they are?
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¹ Cited at I Cite:

Zizek writes: "Lacan's notion of the debt that pertains to the very notion of the symbolic order is strictly homologous to this capitalist debt: sense as such is never 'proper'; it is always advanced, 'borrowed from the future'; it lives on the account of the virtual future sense."

Relation Of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed. Any woman who would try to possess you doesn't understand you.

One can only come into a relation of love with you.

How did...

How did you write that poem? How did you paint that painting? How did you find that friend? How did you know to be in that place at that particular time? How did you know how to escape that situation or choose that deal?

Unrepeatable and beyond explanation. Nor can you properly impart the sense of wonder you felt at what happened.

The series of apparently random coincidences that occurred to get you from point A to C were actually specific. A specific sequence. Intuition got you there.

It's a trustworthy navigator.

But requires 'letting go.'

In this way, it is akin to religious belief.

Living your prayer; living your wishes.

Putting aside your tiny maps and trusting that you know the way.

Let go. And find what you are looking for.