Friday, August 27, 2010

Display and Connectivity

An aside:
Due to the lack of connectivity in my apartment, and in the spirit of trying to make sense of Flagstaff, I expect that I will be posting more regularly via the Tumblr account than through Blogger. For those who notice these once in a while on the Facebook feed--as all posts are routed to the Facebook via the Tumblr--nothing besides slightly more frequent posts will be noticed. For those who follow the blog itself, you may want to check more regularly at the Tumblr (http://bakingphilosophy.tumblr.com). The Tumblr will continue to be where articles, videos, images, and links will be posted more regularly.

~~~

For many people, this will be nothing new. I have had many conversations with women that have included this sort of consideration, but I felt it rather potently today, just a few scant hours ago.

The undergraduate students are returning to NAU. Many, many of them appear extraordinarily young. I suppose that is in part due to the playful activity of first-years in the early stages of orientation. They have some sort of treasure hunt afoot in order to get a lay of the land around here. I suppose I have done something similar in my few trips to campus--when I visited in early summer, last Tuesday, the Monday before--and have biked through and adjacent to it while in Flagstaff. Suddenly there is the grand transition about the campus, a metamorphosis or awakening into itself. Very soon, it will be an academy again where classes are commonplace, professors instruct, and students are everywhere.

I spent most of my morning amidst the SLUGG garden, a student-run garden near my department's offices, where I read and thought and wrote and generally enjoyed the clear air, bright but shaded light, and near absence of fellow students, my age or younger. I moved to North campus for lunch and after lunch, read for a spell outside the library while ominous clouds scuttled in overhead. I realized my posture and demeanor, and at one point my tone, were just so, sculpted as it were to make clear certain personal affectations.

Somewhere along the way, I had put myself on display for people to see. It has occurred to me that I make more of an effort to dress this way or that over the past year, but this had all the more to do with composure, eye contact, stature were intended to inform everyone of my status, my persona, my image of myself as a graduate student, intellectual, and informed--let's use the term...--resident. I can't say why, exactly, but there I was strutting my feathers just as any other peacock might.

Anyway, I have since moved inside to use the internet, power, the facilities, and to avoid the rain. I feel more myself inside, less strained to make myself into a particular manifestation. Instead, here I am working on my computer, taking advantage of wireless that I do not have in the apartment. I want to feel like the showmanship was a sort of game rather than a mask, that it is something I can play that doesn't play me. All the same, I know that the line between them is thin and that worries me.

Alterity, Binary, Solidarity: Reflections on Cultural Alterity by Ofelia Schutte

From 26 August 2010, around 10:00 pm

I feel inspired. I picked up a few books from the Cline Library at NAU the other day and couldn't help but snatch a few philosophy books. It has been over a year since I have taken a philosophy course and it seems... unsuitable. Perhaps I have begun wearing clothes that do not quite fit. (This is actually true, I have taken to enjoying the fit of large tee-shirts despite—or because of—their slightly too small cut.) One of those books is Women of Color and Philosophy which contains the essay mentioned in the above title.

Here are a few lines that have me thinking:

“What are the points of contact today between feminists from developing countries and western feminism?” (60)

“Postcolonial feminisms differ from the classic critique of imperialism in that they try to stay away from rigid self-other binaries... Postcolonial feminisms call attention to the process of splitting of culturally dominant subject in terms of the demands placed on the dominant subject by culturally disadvantaged others.” (61)

“People in mixed unions that are based on parity... are very strongly motivated to understand each other, as well as to communicate with each other so as to communicate with each other so as to deepen and strengthen their understanding. Such individuals commit themselves to lifestyles in which giving of one's time to reach out to the other, as well as making space for the other's differences, are part of the very fabric of daily existence, neither a forced nor an occasional happening.” (63)

The first half of the essay—which I read yesterday and so is somewhat less fresh in my mind—has to do with the mechanics of intercultural dialogue, especially in the context of asymmetrical cultural authority. It provides a solid means to the later parts, but it is difficult to parse clearly from the quotes themselves.

Well, it got me thinking of an article I am very interested in writing. I want to understand a means for engaging in trans-cultural ethical conversations in an egalitarian way. That is, I want understand or articulate the tools needed to fairly converse about ethics between cultures. This is a long-term piece that was set by the wayside last summer but hope to return to eventually. It is still a puzzle that thoroughly interests me.

But being in Flagstaff, a stranger to this town of visitors (I think of A Garden in Winter, which I wrote this last Winter in and Spring and have posted here), these words and my thoughts steer elsewhere. I feel deeply motivated to explore “points of contact” and to negotiate out of “rigid self-other binaries.” I have no one in this town I know well; that is, even with the earnest and heartfelt kindness of Miss Johannesen, I cannot deny that we are still getting acquainted. This is by means a sleight to Miss Johannesen, only a recognition of the brief—if noteworthy time—we have known one another, and I refer to Julia here because if I am friends with anyone in this town, I am friends with her.

That said, I have an abundance of acquaintances I am eager to understand better. In no great amount of time, I would like to call many of these people friends; unfortunately I feel that doing so now would be somehow premature. Nonetheless, Ms. Schutte's words ring deeply. In exploring the dialect of this specific place (by specific, I mean this point in my personal history; this time of beginnings, firsts, and mottled understanding; this particular locale being Flagstaff, NAU campus, the Village Baker, the apartment complex; and the network of friends in Lincoln, around the country, and new bonds here) I wish to foster a tongue appropriate for dissolving boundaries and authoritarian expectations of those around me.

How is it that one might make light conversation with someone without imposing on her/him the sort of filter or rules of engagement that Schutte describes? Mostly, it seems, one makes a quiet, even tacit effort to open one's mind and ears to listen more carefully. Schutte decries the way a dominant audience will splice together the easy bits of a cross-cultural conversation and make up a conclusion to fit her/his expectations. (She uses particular gendered grammar mechanics I here avoid.)

A broad openness to the language of another person—not just words or tone, but body, gesture, accent, reference, personal narrative play a part in her/his language—necessitates a disrobing of the tools we have come into the habit of using to understand one another. Especially in this town of visitors and transients—words with intentionally overlapping but not synonymous denotation—such an effort to unequip oneself is especially demanding; it leaves one more open to harm, naked before a person. Such nakedness may lead one into blunder all the same, but erring in such a way almost equally facilitates a resolution. Whereas the dominant interlocutor claiming understanding where there is none is much more likely to fatally wound a developing relationship.

In some way, I hope I have been engaged in this vernacular for some time. I often attempt to articulate my understanding back to someone in the midst of a conversation. In effect, I hope to say, “If you mean this, then I understand you pretty well. If you do not mean this, then I would like us to step back again so that we can right my course.” The effort here is to work simultaneously in the same direction. This, I suppose, developed out of attempts to actively listen to people I want to understand clearly, but it also plays into this role of spacious conversation. With this sort of interpersonal, cultural space we can more clearly navigate around as well as with one another.

Traveling Meditations III - Water

Meditations on Water – From 11 -13 August



(Note: The night of 10 August was spent in a hotel in Santa Fe. That part of the trip was very enjoyable and included the St. Francis of Assisi Basilica, the Contemporary Native American Museum of Art, a stroll through the Old Square, and other events. My aims for this series of reflections does not include Santa Fe.)



Coming upon the Painted Desert has its own sort of reality to it. I recalled a story in one of my Lovecraftian story anthologies—the specific one I forget—in which an adventuresome couple goes into the Southwest in hopes of discovering this poorly mapped establishment. The suggestion is that it is a ghost town, but in truth it is a weak point between boundaries between our world and something like the dream world of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Through the Gate of the Silver Key. Out in the Southwest, one has a definite sense of proximity to some other place or thinness of our own sense of time and space. The air is thin and changes quickly, in the summer monsoons footsteps are rapidly washed away, animals are sparse and elusive (except for the damnable mosquitoes), and distances can seem inaccurately far or near. Not to mention the brilliance of stars and the weight of the sun playing their own peculiar mental tricks.



I can also recall the fantasy novels I read in my adolescence based on the Magic: the Gathering card game, a significant notion of which were bubbles of disparate time. These spatial bubbles took on faster and slower temporal movement, sometimes drastically so, which made transport between them of living matter very difficult. (Imagine stepping through an invisible barrier and suddenly feeling numbness in your leg as the tissue therein used up its oxygen and half again or twice the speed as usual; meanwhile your heart moves at an expected rate and under-supplies oxygen to your muscles causing strain and potentially damage.) The trick between movement from one place to the other was through water, which acted to soften the temporal discontinuities and to dampen their effects so that one might move from one place to the other without damage. (The series also emphasized water as a transporter by crafting an interdimensional, the Weatherlight, as a flying ship, closer to a caravel than a spacecraft.)



In its way, these weird fiction and fantasy stories got something right. Water does play a profound role in facilitating the movement through time in a way that we cannot easily appreciate. Water has both the direct, short-view impact on the surroundings—saturated soil, hydrated plants and animals, replenishing groundwater, spurring growth, etc.—and the startling long-view effects—carved bedrock, soil removal and transportation, changing ecosystems, shifted rivers, filled in lakes, glaciers and their rending of stone, etc.—that are so outlandish it is difficult to appreciate without at least a little abstraction. Not only that, but these events happen simultaneously with each circulation of water.



The signs of water and its reflection left in stone are everywhere in the Painted Desert and especially in the Petrified Forest section therein. Over many thousands of years, water gradually deposited sediments that the stream was inadequate to carry. If a stream is fast moving, it can carry larger sediments; if it is slow moving, and likely lower, the stream can only carry fine sediments and will deposit the larger ones. In this way, one can see the seasonal variations in the ancient streambed in the sediments of the Painted Desert. Not only that, but the later carving of the Painted Desert was the result of water as well, water that cuts through the ancient bed and exposes the undulations of the streams forebear.





Shallow, ephemeral creaks and rivers carve out washes in the desert landscape, areas of calm, smooth sand that mark the easy and well-traversed passage of storms. In the monsoon season—summer months when brief but intense rainstorms, likely thunderstorms, roll it and dump fat drops of rain in the region—these washes will fill up in little time at all. The are the main vein of the innumerable tributaries all over the landscape, tributaries as thin as a finger that continue to reveal mineralized tree trunks and fossil caches all over the landscape.



Even before the present, intemperate impacts of rain, the landscape was dominated by a tropical or subtropical climate and ecosystem. The Petrified Forest is the result of a strong river that carried down whole trees during flooding events upstream, only to drop their driftwood loads when the river flow calmed. These stripped trees would become waterlogged and sink, where they would be covered by sediment and ash, the minerals in which would replace the original lignin of the trees resulting in the spectacular mineralization of the Petrified Forest. It seems that no matter what happens there, water will be a ruling factor in the landscapes manifestation.





I cannot help but ponder the sense of thinness in the air. Has it always been there? Is such a perception the result of desert aridity, a foreign environment, rapidly changing weather? Do I feel far from the usual because I am markedly distant from my normal circumstances of paved lanes and geometric buildings?





In a place so much defined by water, I laugh at the reality of carrying so many liters of it with us. Dustin and I would hike for miles, drinking occasionally in the not unpleasant heat. We are boys of the Midwest where heat is thick and humid and cold is sharp, dry, and painful. (Dustin's time in Louisiana, I think, does not breach this sort of expectation.) Strolling in the sunshine without humidity in the way, we feel ourselves clearly moving, unhindered by the usual weight of our previous circumstances. We are infused with not just our own energy, but the excitement and mystique of this uncommon realm.










Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Lightness - from 22 August

Internet access around the apartment is spotty and pirated, so I can't really post from there. I am currently at the graduate student orientation and taking advantage of the wireless. Here is an entry written the other day.

~~~

22 August 2010, Sunday late morning

For the last few days I have felt this peculiar lightness. Not weightlessness and not flightiness. I am not more urged or guided in one direction than usual, but I feel the more subtle tugs in each direction more finely. Not until just now did I realize what it was.

Yesterday I described in my personal journal my not unpleasant sense of aloneness. It is, at times, sharpened into feeling lonesome but has not yet manifested as loneliness. Feeling lonesome is, in a way, not unpleasant for me. Rather, it is an appreciation for those episodes or places that are enriched by the company of others. Eating my meals alone, I often sense that strange absence of another person with whom I might share that meal. Whereas loneliness is much more of a longing for that space to be filled, it is an attachment to a person or type that, in their absence, the present moment is degraded.

This lightness, though, has different qualities. It did not come together on the camping trips between Lincoln and Flagstaff or in the house I was staying in before the apartment. This ethereal sensation must have arisen Friday or thereabout despite my bicycle technical difficulties that occurred that day. What it is, I believe, is a sort of calm release of those responsibilities and concerns I have experienced for most of this year. Many of my obligations have been these long-term expectations and their slow conclusions; work applications, graduate school concerns, money issues, finding housing, arranging roommates, graduate assistantship paperwork and confusion, etc. Now, though, most of these issues are resolving or slipping out of mind. What I have now is immediacy and immediacy feels distinctly light.

Part of this sensation, I am sure, is an easily fostered sense of peace in my new quarters. I feel pruned and tidied. What I have is what I need and what I need is nearby. I can maintain a sense of quiet in my living room which makes a sense of quiet in my mind all the easier. (This notion of noise and tranquility play a part in my dislike of driving which is necessarily loud and my preference for biking which is, under most circumstances, rather serene—at least when it comes to the vehicle in question.) For most of the past week, I have been scrambling for those things a living space generally requires—light, cleaning supplies, certain tools, food, cookware, silverware, and specific items of furniture—and now that those items are more or less in place and the clutter is off the floor, I have this wholesome sensation of satisfaction.

That said, I look forward to my roommates arriving. The apartment remains rather sparse and I think their arrivals and expectations for the apartment will metamorphose the place beneficially. Also, I am excited to show off what I cannot help but feel is very much my handiwork. I could not have made the trip very easily without my brother, nor could I have moved in without Miss Julia J and Mr. Eric to assist in his absence. All the same, finding certain items on craigslist and arranging it just so feels especially personal, peculiarly reflective of me. When Miss Mari A. and Mr. Tim H. make their appearances, I hope it is a welcoming place for them not just to step inside, but to make their own as well.

Perhaps this lightness will fade with coming responsibilities. I may even begin working this coming week and I have scheduled events that require my attendance. The subsequent week I have classes and hope to have real work hours besides. Not to mention rent will be coming up again in no scant amount of time—rent I think my bank account can handle. Nevertheless, I cannot perceive those realities becoming painfully heavy. It may be that I have found a solid mental place, a psychic calm that has been rather fleeting up until now.

Traveling Meditations II - Earth

Concerning 10-11 August



The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers argued persistently about the elementary substance, the fundamental material that composed the world. Most Ancient Greeks acknowledged a sort of elemental physics, that the world was principally constructed by combinations of wind, water, earth, and fire. Many of these philosophers argued that three of the elements were derived from the fourth, through some process of chemical or environmental mutation. If one were to argue that water were the primary element, fire might be the result of exceedingly perturbed water. After all, when one watches a flame, it looks very much like a current rising upward rather than streaming outward or downward.



In a certain way, this is comparable to one of the great issues in contemporary physics. Most physicists recognize that the four fundamental forces in the universe—the strong and weak nuclear forces, electro-magnetism, and gravity—are highly related. Originally electricity and magnetism were thought to be different forces, one having an effect on the flow of electrons, the other having to do with the organization of molecules; but when you run an electric current (an odd choice of term) through most metals, you create an electromagnet. This experiment elucidates a deep connection between electricity and magnetism that leads, in turn, to the realization that they are part of the same force. Not only that, but theoretical physics points to the likely synthesis of the four forces into one under extreme conditions, conditions that were likely present in the early universe. (Gravity's inclusion depends on the incorporation on many-dimensional space, a confusing but important characteristic of contemporary physics I will not here explore.)



Most of our travels and our destinations emphasized earth; not as a fundamental so much as indispensable element of the locales. Earth provides a setting, a sense of place, and the basis to build. Many world origin myths begin with a never-ending ocean, a pre-world in which nothing material exists, it all comes and goes with the slight perturbations of waves, swallowed again by the ocean itself. (This, I might add, shares somewhat with the curious depictions of quantum foam, the inconceivably minuscule realm below subatomic particles like quarks.) The creation of land, of earth is the first breach in mythical narrative, the singularity that makes the world itself possible. Endless ocean represents not an unknown, the way later explorers might see the ocean, but the cosmic, non-human unknowable. Water, here, does not represent a beginning, but a vast, chaotic void. (Enlightenment philosophers would later argue fervently about the seemingly impossible notion of the void in which no substance existed.) It is the climbing, jutting, solid explosion of earth that makes the world something other than insusbstantial and unknowable.



Climbing in the preserves and parks around Great Sand Dunes National Park, it was easy to make that connection between earth and being. The dunes themselves are formed by streams' slow decay of the landscape and carrying the sand, silt, and soil downstream. (Downstream, mind you, is always to the ocean.) Winds carry the soil back uphill to the flats and to the Dunes where the surrounding hills curtail the wind, creating a large vortex that results in the sands' deposition. At the very edge of the sands the elevation changes and with it the ecological conditions; just uphill the presence of water and more tenable soils provide strong footing for plant and animal life. (Like all healthy natural deserts, the dunes are lively and active in their unyielding way, full of tenacious, spindly plants and quick desert creatures; but the distinction between the two is profound.)



Here, we can see life in much grander design, much finer detail than the sparsity of the dunes supports. Coniferous trees, well-suited for the dry, thin air climb to the sky and fall to the ground, many with roots holding stolid to geometrically carved boulders. In clearings, thick scrubby grasses stretch and soak in the brilliant open sky. (I believe that the soil thickness plays a strong part in whether trees or grasses grow at the same altitude in these locations.) Birds sing in the morning and various insects call at night. Even here, one sees a strange symmetry between the elements: fallen trees, stripped of bark grow in tidal formations; fungi use chemical fires to digest cellulose in the wood; stone circles depict where previous hikers have made their fires; the sun heavy rocky stretches are particularly air thin in the heat. All around one senses a balancing, an equilibrium between the elements in its subtle and suggestive metamorphoses.



Dustin built a fire and we cooked with his jet engine-like camping stove. I fell asleep long before him, but woke many times due to the hard ground and the cold. It hovered in the thirties at that altitude with so little moisture in the air. I was painfully ill-prepared for the night. My face numbed because I could not slide deeply enough into my sleeping bag despite its 30 degree threshold. All through the trip I dreamed strangely, aggressively in my fitful sleep.



I woke early but could not manage a fire because dew had saturated most of the kindling. I felt markedly unhappy, a slow, creeping headache lined most of the day. It was beautiful out, clear and kind to us, but sleeplessness and frustration made me stubborn. During the late morning I witnessed parents refusing their children the joy of exploring the dunes and the landscape, while I wondered what they had expected from the park.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Traveling Meditations I - Air

Concerning 9-10 August

Despite being one of those distinctly earthy place, the Midwest seems inevitably ruled by air. It is not in the turbulent potency of tornadoes or the roiling brew storm clouds any more than it is in the soil and undulating tides of grasses and corn. To speak of a place or region being an air place rather than an earth place isn't to deny that everywhere is a balance of elements, but to elevate one characteristic to its distinct, prevalent, almost cognitively urgent quality. When one encounters the Midwest, one encounters the sublime breadth of air.



Driving through Nebraska and Western Kansas on our way to Comanche State Grasslands, farmland fanned out in all directions much of the way. In pockets of Kansas and then, later, in Colorado one could identify respectable stretches of prairie land, often but not exclusively near grazing cattle. Watching the populace stalks of corn or the medium prairie grasses, I felt some of that same satisfaction I have with the Midwest in its harsh, dry, windblown winters. This is not a warm or soft or even welcoming satisfaction; if anything, it is sharp.



Wind has that peculiar ability to cut. Metal and stone and wood and even ice have that potential to cut, but their wounds only go as deep as they are forced. Wind goes through you—if you are not careful—and carries something out with it again. The earnest airborne character of the Midwest is that it cuts, cleans, purifies its uninsulated inhabitants. A shoot of grass is, aesthetically speaking, a cleansed creature. (Here, I hope to adequately divorce the specifically [in]human connotations of cleanse or pure which may get in the way. The terms are intended to refer to some mode of sanctity; just as ablutions were intended to purify the person for sacred rights or ceremony, purity here entails a preparedness or clarity of character.) All of the grass is specific, simplified, pared down to just what it is. So much so that wildflowers in the Midwest act as veritable explosions, surprising the viewer with each splash of yellow, red, orange, violet, or white. Even the flowers generally exhibit a sort of respectful modesty about themselves—a calm demeanor, a particular size—as if the frills have been pruned.



Driving in the Midwest is more similar to sailing than it is to driving in, say, the mountains. The mountains force a vehicle—automobile, bicycle, feet, whatever—to yield and navigate and circumvent, but the Great Plains allow this grand, undiscouraged mobility through it. Albeit, a sail boat is determined generally by wind and the sails, one cannot help feeling a sense of riding rather than driving in the Midwest. One is on the move rather than just moving. I watched the sky as I tried to eke a few meager stretches of sleep that first day. Its blueness, its grandeur, its mature patience didn't grant me rest, so much as repose.

We slept in a park in Tribune, Kansas with two cyclists—Sara and Adam—making their way across the country nearby. Sara ate some of our food, happy to find something vegan friendly, while Adam found his own fare at a gas station down the road. They shared with us stories of elderly couples longing for their children and inviting in young strangers instead, of cross-country legends and rumors with pedals under their feet, of the ruthlessness of livestock truck drivers on their familiar two-lane highways. That night I slept poorly and dreamed anxiously, confusedly. The edges of the sky was lined with lightning storms, flashes and hard-edge bolts illuminating the soft, edges of clouds. In the morning, two women, on in their years, swam in the community pool.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Getting Satisfaction

I have a book, music, and enough light to read by; I am satisfied.

Today became long with no more hours than the norm. I can't say it makes much sense. Likely tomorrow evening, after a good deal of running about, I'll sit down at Macy's and write one or two entries about my travels. The demands of the last few days--unpacking, furnishing, cleaning, purchasing odds and ends, getting lost and finding my way, looking for work, etc.--have taken a toll. That toll has been somewhat alleviated by new acquaintances and their fine company, and baking this morning helped, but still more needs doing.

Now, though, I am off to bed. I leave you with this:

The cat here on earth
Modern totem
And intermittently decorative
-a haiku from Paloma

Thank you Muriel Barbery for writing The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

{No post this evening due to making friends with the neighbors downstairs. Apologies for the delay, which would happen anyway because I don't have internet access yet.}

Address! Paella! Baking (soon)!

I have an apartment! That also mean that I have an address! That means you can send me things!

Caleb A Phillips
3835 S. Yaqui St. #2C
Flagstaff, AZ 86001

Some individuals may get this specially sent to them as per their request. Also, I have a booklet of fold-up letters that I plan on writing once I figure out where the mailbox near my place is.

If I can sneak my way onto someone's wi-fi, I'll be posting something about my travels tonight. In the meanwhile, I am trying to put together something like an application for jobs I actually want, or--barring that--tolerate and will allow me to pay the bills.

Finally, yesterday afternoon I had people over who helped me move in, then ate the paella I made having learned the method from Dustin the day before. New acquaintances include (friends seems like a rushed term, even though I fed them and they approved, also I am not posting last nights out of some weird sense of discretion): Miss Julia J. who is a fellow student in my program, Mr Eric (guest and sweetheart of Miss Julia), Mr Aaron E., and Miss Cori C. with her sweetheart whose name I have at the moment misplaced (which is unfortunate since we geeked out over both Linux and baking). They were wonderful guests and enjoyed the vegetarian paella! I doubt the place would have felt all that much like a place to live had I not so quickly hosted them. Also in order to make the place feel more livable, I plan on baking very soon, as a starter tonight and bread tomorrow.

Anyway, the place is still in pieces, but is definitely coming together. Maybe some photos...

[Posted from Macy's.]

Monday, August 16, 2010

Partial Transitions

So, after nigh on a week of driving, hiking, and camping--with a brief hotel stay in Santa Fe--my brother and I made it to Flagstaff. On the way, we camped in a public park in Tribune, Kansas; Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado (followed by Santa Fe); and then two nights in Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. We planned on staying at Comanche State Prairie Reserve (or something like that) in Southeast Colorado the first night, but didn't make it there in time. As I told my brother Friday night, had I told myself how much I would enjoy the trip, I would not have believed myself. Though it is true, it may be in part due to how I hedge my bets. Either way, it was pretty spectacular. Now I have some adequate camping gear to use in the beautiful areas around Flagstaff.

This whole trip I have been distracted or contemplating the primal elements of earth, fire, wind, and water. Lines from the Mountains and Waters Sutra have haunted me. Here is an excerpt and a link:

Some beings see water as a jeweled ornament, but they do not regard jeweled ornaments as water. What in the human realm corresponds to their water? We only see their jeweled ornaments as water. Some beings see water as wondrous blossoms, but they do not use blossoms as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or pus and blood. Dragons see water as a palace or a pavilion. Some beings see water as the seven treasures or a wish-granting jewel. Some beings see water as a forest or a wall. Some see it as the Dharma nature of pure liberation, the true human body, or as the form of body and essence of mind. Human beings see water as water. Water is seen as dead or alive depending on causes and conditions. Thus the views of all beings are not the same. You should question this matter now.


I have witnessed so many instances of wood being water, earth being fire or water, water being fire, and so on. At first, it felt like a pleasant meditation, but the more it occurred the more I felt drawn to the challenge of "Dragons [that] see water as a palace or a pavilion." In a way, though, challenge is completely inappropriate a term; what it felt more accurately was simply seeing that these were not distinct things.

Over the next few days, I plan on writing brief essays about my stay in each place, the recollections of those places, and reflections on my journal entries I made. The exploration, confusion, excitement, joy, distress, doubt, and accomplishment I felt were often with me. I will post photographs with those posts when the time comes. At the moment, I have more housekeeping to accomplish and wish to leave you with this:


Sunset, Petrified Forest, 12 August 2010

Now when dragons and fish see water as a palace, it is just like human beings seeing a palace. They do not think it flows. If an outsider tells them, "What you see as a palace is running water," the dragons and fish will be astonished, just as we are when we hear the words, "Mountains flow." Nevertheless, there maybe some dragons and fish who understand that the columns and pillars of palaces and pavilions are flowing water. You should reflect and consider the meaning of this. If you do not learn to be free from your superficial views, you will not be free from the body and mind of an ordinary person. Then you will not understand the land of Buddha ancestors, or even the land or the palace of ordinary people. Now human beings well know as water what is in the ocean and what is in the river, but they do not know what dragons and fish see as water and use as water. Do not foolishly suppose that what we see as water is used as water by all other beings. Do not foolishly suppose that what we see as water is used as water by all other beings. You who study with Buddhas should not be limited to human views when you are studying water. You should study how you view the water used by Buddha ancestors. You should study whether there is water or no water in the house of Buddha ancestors.

~Mountains and Waters Sutra, Eihei Dogen, part 16

Sunday, August 8, 2010

I Don't Think I Should Be Sorry

Happy Birthday Walkencore
Here is the playlist for your birthday mix:
I Don't Think I Should Be Sorry
1. Bambi by Tokyo Police Club
2. 1901 by Phoenix
3. Well Now by Jesse Rose
4. Bad Reputation by Joan Jett
5. Guilt by The Long Blondes
6. Tonight's Today by Jack Penate (which has a tilde over the "n")
7. Boys Don't Cry by The Cure
8. Crystalised by The xx
9. Got My Dream (Messengers Remix) by J.Period & K'NAAN
10. Kilometer (A-Trak Main) by Sebastien Tellier
11. My Love (Diplo Remix) Justin Timberlake
12. Fall Hard by The Shout Out Louds
13. Roll Up Your Sleeves by We Were Promised Jetpacks
14. Bloodbuzz Ohio by The National
15. The Prowl by Dan Auerbach
16. Jungles by Holy Fuck
17. Song With A Mission by The Sounds
18. What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had To Go This Way) by Wolf Parade
19. Knife/Heartbeats (Mash Up by PARRKA) by Grizzly Bear/The Knife
20. Use Somebody (Kings of Leon Cover) by Bat For Lashes

Your party was wonderful. Many happy 24ths.

Also, I leave tomorrow morning for Flagstaff. My brother and I are spending days camping on the way. Expect sparse Tumblr updates from my phone and some reflections following. I move into the apartment in Flagstaff a week from today. Wish me luck.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Tumbling & Building

I feel like I ought to write again in order to prevent the last post from staying at the top for too long. I don't disagree with it or dislike it, but I feel like it may give a false representation of the weblog as a whole. As to where to go from here, well, that gets a little messy.

Part of the reason I have not been posting is because the concerns of moving to Flagstaff, AZ have been high priority and thoroughly distracting. I have gone days and likely weeks without looking at my computer, which has its perks, but also means I haven't been writing. I am not one who has an easy time moving. I feel only lightly attached to most to my goods--clothing, computer, books, notebooks, phone, movies--but when it comes to ruling out some for travel, I am pretty bad at it. I can live out of a backpack for weeks on end--which I manage to do in wintertime travels--and have pared down my toiletries to the minimum. This endeavor to move to Flagstaff comes with different expectations. I want to build a place for myself there, a place to welcome others into and to share some of those artifacts of myself with others.

When I consider a place to dwell--not just inhabit or live in, but to dwell--it is a place with those books and films that I represent or partially embody something about myself. When I lend someone The Fall or Labyrinths or Swamp Thing Volume 1, I simultaneously prepare myself for the conversations concerning those items. The Fall describes these beautiful dreamworld locales, places that actually do exist, but take on their own surreal, brilliant qualities once you start telling yourself the story of having been to those places; I feel that I have shared in the filming locations in The Fall in my own way. Labyrinths has, more so than religious and nonfiction philosophical texts, challenged my conception of the world, the narrative that describes the world to myself; Jorge Luis Borges isn't just telling stories to elucidate and entertain, but to suggest an alternative position of oneself in the world. As for Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, it marks part of my life adjacent to when I started reading Borges as well as my earnest introduction to comics, but more seriously forced me to consider how we tell stories, not just in text and images, but in film, gaming, and song.

(Spoiler Alert for Ghostworld ahead.) A very large part of me wants to either limit the things I bring or cut them out altogether. In Daniel Clowes Ghostworld, Enid dreams of leaving home with nothing but a valise of clothes and a hat. The plot eventually drives her--more explicitly in the film than in the graphic novel--to make just such a move, but her own will is exercised out of desperation and not out of willful independence. In Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Adrian Tomine also describes a character retrospecting on her move to a new place and her attempt to recreate herself, to be someone new but she does not deny herself her idiosyncratic loves (such as an erotic attachment to the smell of old books) that become painful neuroses following a split romance. If one is to allow these stories to lean on one another, the suggestion is that Enid will remain Enid wherever her bus takes her, inexcusably. The aspiration remains, the way that I read it anyway, that she will be herself in a more unabashed way, that being herself will not be a splinter in her life elsewhere. (Of course, Clowes and Tomine, if either were to write the story, would likely deny their protagonists just such an opportunity for successful personal recreation.)

Whether it was going off to school or coming back from it, or the two academic trips abroad, I took the opportunity to be myself in a different way. From this vantage, I can't say that I was more or less myself than before, only that I was myself in distinct ways. Imagine seeing the sun from Earth; it has its comfortable size, brilliant but not awful hue, the warm but not usually offensive rays. Now, consider the view from another planet in the solar system. From Mercury, the sun is immense and blinding, ruthless and unkind, dominating the sky in Mercury's slow revolution. From the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, the sun is a bright but cold star in the sky, the sky itself claimed by the mother planets just an astronomical skip away; it is a minor but clearly present character in the sky, something like a social acquaintance rather than a parent. From the far reaches of the solar system, the sun is just an especially bright star in the sky, similar to Mars or Venus as seen from Earth, its light and heat so dissipated as to be negligible.

In each case, one still sees the same sun, the star that gives heat, light, and life to our small blue orb. Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel the character of that nuclear furnace manifests itself distinctly from each point of view. From these extreme perspectives, the differences can be profound, even disturbing. Rarely do we view our acquaintances, neighbors, friends, and family from such radically diverse locations, but the metaphor holds; just because someone describes him/herself differently does not mean that the person is acting dishonestly to him/herself. In those occasions when someone is in close, viewing the flaws, fractures and gems of who we are, we may be able to understand that diversity of personality, that flexibility of persona infinitely more than we can from the usual familiar or familial distances.

Generally speaking, I have very little difficulty welcoming people closer to my orbit. I find excitement and joy with that tight revolution around another person, romantic or amiable. Though they are not me, the artifacts I take with me are stepping stones, asteroids, signposts to guide new people closer to me. The process is frustrating and mildly dangerous, the way littered with misplaced books and films, a distraught face and tightened heart, a wasted night or tardy date. Those risks need not toughen the skin or line the face when they can allow us closer to ourselves, allow us to appreciate the potency of temperament, passion, confusion, uncertainty. I collect the artifacts of myself so that when I enter a new place I can enter it with the notion of, "the more you have, the more you have to give away."

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Darkness & Lightning

It smells of youth, mischief, sweat, and sex outside. Lightning flashes in all directions but the south, gathering or rallying in great sonorous blasts, like long brass trumpets. Yesterday the winds were such that the smell of shit came in and, though it hasn't exactly vanished, has dissipated or been outperformed by new competitors. Friends of ne'er-do-well neighbors have parked poorly by the corner, tempting each turning vehicle to leave its mark on a bumper or rear, driver's side door.

Something about tonight--rumbling thunder, pungent odors, nigh oppressive humidity, the shear electricity--rings inarguably of power, sexuality, beastliness. It feels like a night for monsters and demons, for an assault on the senses, on bodies. Competitive sports, especially brutal ones, come to mind. The personal aroma of labor, heat, and humidity bring together a private involvement, an intermixing of skin and light and noise. I have felt displaced, uncoordinated all day; distractions and discouragement mounting about every other corner. Now, though, I perceive some stronger urge; not necessarily my own, but one undeniably present.

Oddly, I cannot escape the sensuality of thunderstorms, of the blend of fear, excitement, suspense, proximity of darkness interspersed with flashes of light, blasts of guttural sound. The heavy, heady air has its own intoxicating qualities, its power to subdue and suggest. Everything about tonight carries some promise or threat just beyond the glare of houselights and streetlamps, outside the limit of what you expect to see and what you want to see.

The night smacks of the macabre and of the primeval; of mischief for no other sake than the Bacchic spirits demand it. Tonight would be a night for painful satisfaction, for bitemarks and the smell if not the taste of iron. Proximity, privacy, sensuality all come with their double-edge, their expectations or aspirations of trust but the threat of damage, harm, decay, abandon. Abandon not just in the sense of loss, but in the sense of disregard to oneself, to expectations, to inhibitions and guidance. The moon is waxing tonight, half decayed from its full, but something has all of its potency.

Horror stories and fantastic fiction come to mind, the pressures and drives of the environment on places and people. Mages and mystics refer to ley lines that crisscross the Earth, marking highways of psychic or earthen or celestial power. Soils or caverns become blessed or cursed, therefore tainting the residents and landscape above. Millions gather in Varanasi, India to cleanse away sins, make offerings, of spread ashes at the northern turning of the Ganges where the Goddess-turned-river flows back toward heaven. Lovecraft chronicles the falling of a meteorite and its spectacular transformation of the land and its farming family in "The Colour Out of Space." Being Human suggests that part of the lycanthropic cycle is based on atmospheric pressure due to lunar gravity. Temples are founded on sacred ground, cities built on sanctified stones, children conceived within blessed circles, all in order to curry some favor or transform the future with some supernatural entity. (I do not casually group the Hindu religion or serious mages and witches with TV paranormal drama and weird fiction, only mean to express a great range of the recurring paranormal realities present in each.)

To view these episodes, places, people as out-dated or quaint misses the reality that is suffused with spirit, energy, supernormal potency. All faiths, cultures, even personal histories are suffused with mystery. Sometimes mystery takes the form of illusion, fraud, and mischief, but I think its manifestation as miracle, magic, and the inexplicably weird is distinct. Something about the night, its sureness, its immediate presence carries with it that peculiar intensity. In a way, it is the energy of a storm, of an especial night, but I also see it, feel it as something else.