luck and lovers

There is no such thing as luck. It is simply a product of gratitude expressed; of gratitude made known.  Sadly, to live of life devoted to random acts of kindness is to live anonymously and which is more conducive to happiness; anonymity or notoriety? To be known and reminded of your deeds, to be renowned, to be made a legend or a tall tail is to be remembered. To live anonymously, committing oneself to kindness left untold, to deeds of generosity of which you go unrecognized is to be forgotten. Good luck is a product of gratitude expressed because our desire to be remembered is reciprocal and we know it. To be remembered is often a byproduct of our serving in the act of ensuring the remembrance of others. The lucky ones are not necessarily the most grateful, but  the ones who express their appreciation whether or not it is genuine. Of course purity is often not ephemeral and because a genuine is so rare and imitation or ulterior motives so pervasive, the golden ones often stand out. Life, though, is not necessarily about constant happiness. In fact, the way I see it, life is necessarily lonely and sad and people are not at all whole. We are fragments of our former selves they say and products of imitations. We are young and stupid and vain and grow older and wiser only to realize that all that we have accumulated weighs heavily. Life is necessarily lonely; it is our unfortunate fortune. Because when we live a live of notoriety then we have necessarily gained some of it by way of disingenuine expressions of gratitude. And if we live a life of anonymity then we live a life in which we are forgotten. And both of these lives are a tradeoff for one another. In either one, we are left fragmented, unwhole, constantly wondering whether it is better to be recognized or to express gratitude unfelt or if it is better to live as a hobbit and be nice, yet keep to oneself, expressing gratitude where we see fit and not because we are hoping that it will lead to good luck.

 

I read in an Oscar Wilde book once "sometimes I feel as if my life were a summation of all of the love affairs that I have had." Each one being so different, filling us up with a part of ourselves that we convince ourself is missing, whether it be reason or faith or money or kinship. Our love affairs make us whole and we are necessarly unwhole, but in different ways throughout the course of our lives. To stick with one lover throughout ones life is to commit to remaining the same yourself and convincing yourself that this lover is the best possible option for completing your circle. truth is tricky business. They say that honesty is about staying true to your "word," your "self," your "other." But your words, selves, and others are fleeting. The self I was and the half of myself that needed completing is not the same as the one I am today. I need completing in a different way today. My needs having been met by this lover and that, I move on and on. Does it ever end? Is truth so simple as to stay true to your word? To stay committed? Or is this not, in fact, the most dishonest thing that one can do?  Is this not to live the truest lie of all?

the last cigarette loomed before me like a painted smokestack in an industrial town during winter. cold and icy were the rooftops where dancing mice yielded umbrellas and swung from chimney to chimney. It was summer and down below flowers sang in the brees and bees relaxed and relapsed on hammocks made of wheat and stitched together with the webs of a thousand meddling spiders. It may seem odd, snow and dancing mice in winter up high while flowers and bees swayed in the breeze down low, but such was the miniature world of the future, shrunken down by a hundred powerfull pens and movie lenses, made real by a million minds of the scientific sort. The technologists had made fiction real and the roboticists had made love to the dozenalists and reprogrammed a master race with base-12 that spoke only in C-. They were the best of times and they were the worst of times, but much more of the latter, all things considered saving for relativity.

technology and the body

At the intersection of the arts and technology is where I want to be. Looking back on my life and looking at myself now, this has been at the heart of all of my deepest questions about how I want to live and who I want to be. I go through phases where I am fascinated by and deeply engaged in all things technology; movies, the internet, Iphone, theatrical technologies, etc etc etc..... and then when I feel like I've lost a sense of who I am as a person, I shun technology; meditate, dance, go out into nature, experiment with food, pay attention to what I'm thinking, how I'm feeling, how external things affect me. I know that I can't only be into one or the other because that is the nature of life these days and to forgo one or the other would be to either reject society which would be lonely or reject myself which is equally as lonely.......... So that space - that crevice where technology meets the human body, is where I want to be, is where I want to ask questions, is where I want to experiment......

I reread my master's thesis and decided that it is deeply personal..... so personal that it probably doesn't make sense... but the best writing is the most honest, the most personal writing..... i can sense the ways in which this is dishonest because I had to write it for school and had limited time and blah blah other reasons, but I can also sense that, in it's entirety, it says something about me and the questions that i am most interested in. It is demonstrative of what i care about most... of navigating that space between being part of the whole, which really means engaging with technology since it is such a huge part of life, and being an individual, which means rejecting anything external.....

Dance, Digital Technology, and the Human Condition;

 New Ways of Seeing, Being, and Belonging

The one inescapable condition surrounding the choreographer in his chosen art is the hard realism of "now." All other arts can wait for the verdict of history if they are rebuffed by the contemporary world--the choreographer not so. To keep faith with himself, he cannot pander to popular taste; he must choose his subject and the means to body it forth from his total convictions about values in art and life. If his work happens to be stimulating to audiences in their current state of development, he is very lucky indeed; but if not, he must resign himself to abandoning his dream child. Not for him the consolation of hanging his creation on the wall in all its original freshness, and waiting hopefully for perhaps posthumous appreciation. There must be hundreds, possibly thousands of dances--some of which were probably masterpieces--completely lost because of this tragic ephemerality. In contrast, one only has to think of painting and music, so often savagely rejected in their day, which a grateful world finally comes to accept and admire. This painful reality of the choreographer's "now" is a powerful temptation to abandon conviction and the most extreme flights of fancy in the interest of survival and prosperity. The wonder is that there are still so many choreographers who will not compromise, and who hug their ideals to their hearts in spite of failure and adversity.

Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances

When writing first emerged, Socrates voiced concerns that this new way of cataloguing thoughts was “taking the soul out of an exchange" (Phaedrus). Likewise, media critics today argue that Google is killing memory. In the Dance world, critics fret over the insurgence of digital technology on what has traditionally been a primarily kinesthetic artform. The present resonates with the past and history continues to expose trends and patterns in the way we conceive, perceive, and receive new forms of existence. According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the paradigms that both shape our world and allow us to acquire knowledge about and within it fluctuate according to their capacity to meet our needs at any given point in time. Each new social, political, artistic, scientific, and cultural paradigm must therefore be evaluated with regard to its positioning amongst other explanatory paradigms, rather than for its ability to elucidate the world we live in today. “What must the world be like in order that (wo)man may know it?" (Kuhn) is the question that drives (wo)man to create. New languages and ways of being and seeing are constantly being created. These new languages reorder our senses, allowing us to discover life anew and reminding us that identity is contestable, porous, and variable. In the performance arts, the recent fusion of new media technologies and dance offers us new ways of communicating through which we might reinvent, reimagine, and reconceptualize the social world.

New media technologies are reconfiguring the way we create, disseminate, document, and present performance art. Likewise, the discipline of Dance, like all forms of art, has a distinct way of speaking. A uniquely kinesthetic artform, dance has the capacity to ask specific questions about, with, and through the use of technology and its relationship to the body. Ultimately, dance performance has specific properties and characteristics that allow digital technology to coexist with the body in a way that other artforms are incapable of establishing. The fear of new media technologies threatening to subsume human beings under cyborgic regimes is widespread. Beyond ethical critiques of the fusion of dance and new media technologies, we might take a more socio-evolutionary perspective and ask how a new language is being created through the synthesis of the roving body and the digital world and how this new language engages our perception and reception of the world in new ways. To familiarize our inherently unknowable world is at the heart of all creation. What the relationship between dance and digital technology and the fears about this new way of speaking ultimately point to are the “necessary fictions” that form the foundation upon which the human sensorium can perceive and ‘know’ its inherently unknowable world. What paradigms about the human condition, identity formation, socialization, politics, religion, nationalism, ethics, art, and other modes of belonging are in place and how does the new language of dance and new media technologies offer insight into these spaces of social construction and imagined utopias?

The nature of communication is constantly changing. The radio rendered communication one-way and enabled mass messages to be dispersed without any feedback. The telephone birthed two-way communication, a built in response system that allowed messages to be sent back and forth. The Internet serves as a portal to and through all of these worlds. Cinema communicates through visual images set in frames, poetry by aestheticizing semantics, music through tonality. Each of these mediums speak to and with each other. Collaboration between different communicative mediums is not a new phenomenon. While merging dance with digital technology creates a new aesthetics, it can also be situated and studied in the context of other patterns of artistic and technological collaboration. How does dance speak? How does technology speak? Both have something to say, a particular way of speaking that is unique unto each of them and new modes of communicating that are created when these two forms of expression merge.

Meaning is relayed in many different ways through many different channels of communication. Marshall McLuhan, speaking about technology, writes that

the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology (McLuhan, 15).

To think of dance as a medium of expression and an extension of ourselves is to reinforce

in the human subject his/her capacity to communicate kinesthetically and to reaffirm

his/her fundamental position as a corporeal being. In this sense, dance introduces a new scale or way of communicating, perceiving, and experiencing both ourselves and the social world. Likewise, new media technologies, while widespread and multifaceted, can be deconstructed in accordance with the laws of digital media. Digital technologies have certain properties that enable them to be studied, categorized, and labeled as such. Both digital technologies and dance performance are the message, yet at the same time, to claim that the human subject of whom they serve as an extension has no agency is to deny the fact that our relationship between art and new media is indeed symbiotic.  In order not to fall prey to the reductive and incarcerating perspective of technological determinism, we might first determine how dance and new media technologies speak, respectively, and then survey the new landscape and forms that are created through the merging of both in order to reaffirm the symbiotic relationship that exists between ourselves and these communicative mediums. Identifying the potentialities that are created when the forms of our existence collide highlights the fluid and porous nature of culture and society. 

Choreographers create and dancers dance for many different reasons. The multifaceted spectrum of motivations that inspires the creation of art is as far reaching as the human catalogue of personalities and identity. Art is a way to represent life, to aestheticize life, and to politicize life and the discipline of dance is one such form of expression through which such prerogatives can be articulated. Dance speaks in a very particular way. While dance choreographers cite dramatically different motives for choreographing and communicating their work, the common element in each creation is the human body being employed as a communicative tool. Dance speaks kinesthetically. Ann Daly writes, “dance, although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinesthetic art whose apperception is grounded not just in the eye but in the entire body” (Daly 2002). According to Daly’s conception of dance as a kinesthetic artform, the audience not only sees a dance, but also feels a dance in a way that employs the entire human sensorium. The roving body is the object and the primary medium of communication in a dance performance. How the body is manipulated, perceived, and experienced by audiences may vary, yet at the heart of all dance is the human body. Mary M. Smyth, in Kinesthetic Communication in Dance, discusses how dance has a special way of communicating and the many ways in which audiences sensually experience movement. She uses the notion of ‘kinesthesis,’ “which relates to movement of one’s own body while the movement of another’s body must be perceived by one or more of the five exteroceptive systems” (Smyth, 19). How one can experience kinesthesis in one’s own body while not actually dancing, but rather by viewing a dance is thus a product of our five senses, which act as channels of input. Smyth, however, leaves her work inconclusive, pointing to directions and avenues of inquiry down which we might look to gain a better understanding of how, exactly, kinesthesis gets communicated. She leaves the potentiality for determining how kinesthesia works open, arguing that “investigation of the processes involved in perception does not take the magic from the experience itself, but magic should always be part of the experience” (Smyth, 22). The mystique with which we regard kinesthetic communication is illustrative of the mystical quality of dance, the imperative of the elusively ephemeral “now” that mystifies those who wish to capture and know it, yet that intrigues those who wish to be constantly reminded of that which they don’t know. Lee Reynolds, in Glitz and Glamor or Atomic Rearrangement contrasts the response of experienced audiences who can read dance more effortlessly versus inexperienced audiences to whom it is less accessible. She writes that

contemporary dance can appear particularly intimidating because it frequently lacks a narrative framework and its movement vocabulary is often unfamiliar to audiences. Aficionados of contemporary dance often seek precisely this unfamiliar and even experimental quality – the shock of the new – whereas spectators without specialist knowledge can be attracted to dance in its more popular forms – notably on screen – because it is presented in contexts which are more familiar to them, such as well-known narratives or music (Reynolds, 20).

This ‘shock of the new’ makes the live dance performance seem inaccessible

to inexperienced viewers because of their presumption that there is a movement

vocabulary necessary to read a dance performance. Reynolds goes on to juxtapose

popular dance movements and dances formatted into narrative structures and set to

music versus more contemporary and ambiguous choreography such as that of William

Forsythe and Twyla Tharp. If we create art and media in as much as they create us, then

the very fact that mass culture has incorporated dance into more readable forms of art that

follow a narrative structure such as theater, film, and television is indicative of the fact

that dance has been rendered illegible and as a form of ‘high art’ that requires

specific knowledge in order to be viewed. As shall be argued, digital media provides

one outlet through which dance might be demystified for the ‘common’ viewer.

In as much as dance speaks in primarily kinesthetic terms, digital technology also has way of communicating all its own. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich outlines the evolution of media technologies and shows how today’s digital media uses the techniques used in print and analog media in order to represent and simulate images. Manovich asks “how do conventions and techniques of old media – such as the rectangular frame, mobile viewpoint, and montage – operate in new media? If we construct an archaeology connecting new computer-based techniques of media creation with previous techniques of representation and simulation, where should we locate the essential historical breaks?”(Manovich, 9). The very fact that these ‘historical breaks’ need be called into question is indicative of the abstractness of history itself. Manovich demonstrates how new media operate according to five principles; numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. These five principles are the elements that allow digital media to speak. An important characteristic of digital media is that is can be broken down into discrete, fractal-like units (the first two principles). This enables the media to be manipulated at the will of the user (the last three principles). The evolution from old media forms into new ones can be thought of as “analog media converted to a digital representation. In contrast to analog media, which is continuous, digitally encoded media is discrete” (Manovich, 50). The ability of new media to be broken down into units is a fundamental aspect of this new generation of media forms. It is this characteristic of digital media, its capacity to be broken down into discrete units, that makes its collaboration with the discipline of dance the subject of so much criticism.

An attempt to demystify the respective communication strategies of new media technologies and dance cannot help but evoke notions of linguistics. While the internet and digital technologies are readily accessible and decipherable for both the commonplace and experienced interface user, dance performance remains largely out of reach. One important distinction to bear in mind is that while digital technology can be broken down into elements that are analogous to spoken or written language (ie. Manovich’s five principles), a dance performance derives its meaning from being experienced as a whole. In Understanding Dance, McFee uses the Wittgenstein slogan “meaning is what the explanation of meaning explains” (McFee, 113) to suggest that meaning in dance cannot be deciphered in the same way as meaning in linguistics or, by extension, digital technology. On the contrary, “the meaning of dances is identified with, roughly, the sum of criticism of these dances” (McFee, 114). We might broaden this perspective to say that everyone is a critic and, thus, to derive meaning out of a dance is not to search, in vain, for nonexistent discrete units, but rather to allow the explanation of the meaning of the dance to speak for itself.  Is digital technology trying futilely to reconcile the necessarily ‘tragic ephemerality’ of dance? What does it mean that new media technologies that can be broken down into discrete units, easily accessed, and essentially provide a way of ‘knowing’ the object at hand can collaborate with a medium of expression that derives its value in large part from its ephemerality? In a Benjaminian reading of this trend, the motivation behind applying new media technologies to dance is “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get-closer’ to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness…” (255, Benjamin).  Our insatiable desire to know the object at hand can be determined to be one reason for the new landscapes that are being created through the intersection of dance and new media technologies.

The intersection of digital technology and live dance performance is itself a performative act. The coexistence of the two not only serves as a new form of artistic expression, but also as a testament to our capacity to create new life, new ways of communicating and expressing, and new ways of being in the world. The relationship between dance and digital technology presents audiences with new ways of seeing. It serves as a catalyst for the emergence of other new forms of expression and ways of being which include, but are not limited to, new ways of directing, rehearsing, presenting, reproducing, educating, choreographing, and critiquing performance art. To apply digital technology to dance is to create an entirely new artistic discipline that speaks to other forms of life and community. Current evolutions that have spawned from these new ways of presenting, representing, and disseminating performance art point to human agency and dispels notions of technological and kinesthetic determinism.

Using digital technology to somehow alter a dance performance is a new trend whose reverberations echo far beyond itself. Digital technology is being used in innovative ways to aestheticize, politicize, and serve a representative function in dance performances. Currently, the University of California at Berkeley runs a theater camp entitled Dance and New Media where high schools students are afforded the opportunity to experiment with using digital media in dance choreography. The Northern European Kedja project recently held a conference called Dance and New Media where scholars from the disciplines of Dance and Design, as well as artists and choreographers were invited to discuss and display ideas about the new landscape of live dance performance. Universities such as the University of Leeds offer research in performance technologies and the intersection of dance with digital media. The British Film and Television Academy is in the process of creating a new awards category called 'interactive multimedia.’ Dance practitioners such as David Forsythe are investigating the potentialities of making choreography more legible by fusing dance performance with digital media. ChoreoPro recently released Dance Designs, a digital choreographic tool that allows dance practitioners to digitally catalogue, create, and disseminate their dances. The trends are multifaceted and far-reaching. Digital technology is not only creating a new aesthetics, but also new opportunities for collaboration between different disciplines. New art precipitates new life and vice versa. The reverberations of one new way of speaking inspire many others. What ultimately ensues are entirely new ways of belonging and being and new landscapes through which we can derive and negotiate meaning.  

             From their inception and wildfire-like dispersion, new media technologies have been the source of a wide variety of fears about the human subject being confined by them. Tim Lenoir reminds us that

“from the very beginning of critical engagement with computer technology, concern has been voiced about the potential, feared by many, celebrated by some, of the end of humanity. The fear that technological developments associated with computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and more recently nanotechnology will succeed in displacing humanity through an evolutionary process leading first to cyborg/human assemblage and ultimately to the extinction and replacement of the human altogether” (Hansen, 2)

This fear is echoed by many others. Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, in an articled in Wired Magazine writes that  "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species." Baudrillard claimed that "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it….It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself." (166). The ethical dimension of digital technology’s widespread influence is clearly a hot topic. However, the fact remains that the human being is unavoidably the source both from which and about which these concerns both emanate and are concerned. To deny this fact is to deny human agency and to reduce the human subject to what cybertheorist humdog claims we are destined to become; “a community of signs, nicely boxed, categorized and inventoried, ready for consumption” (humdog, Pandora’s Vox). To deny human agency is to embrace technological determinism and deny the fact that the relationship between human beings and their forms of existence is indeed symbiotic. "Technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." (Heidegger, 9). It is this essence that we must discover and to which we must defer our awe if we are to begin to understand our relationship with digital media.  

The human body, like digital technology, can be though of in terms of the physical elements that make it up. Like digital technology, it can be analyzed in terms of the discrete units that comprise it; cells, genes, organs, muscles, bones. We are, in one sense, a holistic composition of all of these elements working together to create a physical body. However, the human body, unlike digital technology, exists in real time and cannot be separated into accessibly manipulable frames. It is this body that is always the object of dance.

The material of the dance as an art form consists in human bodies and their movements. Ever since the discovery was made that a given man is mortal, and that his mortality could be inferred from the mortality of all human beings… the material of the art of dance has been recognized as a thing which comes into being and soon passes away (Feibleman, 1).

Whether or not and how it is reproduced, represented, or simulated by, though, and with digital media, what is always at stake as both object and subject of dance is the human being and his/her relationship with the world. Doris Humphrey writes of the “tragic ephemerality” of dance, a fleetingness of the mobile body that lies always just outside the grasp of digital media’s attempts to represent and simulate. Benjamin’s warning that what is lost in the age of technological reproducibility is the aura of the work of art here bears consideration. It is the necessarily ephemeral aura of dance that gives it its definitive quality and the very characteristic that digital media attempts, in naïve, to capture. It is the ephemeral nature of dance that makes it notoriously elusive and allegorically able to speak about the forms of existence and communicablity (politics, art, religion, socialization, culture) through human beings commune. In this sense, dance performance might be one of the only forms about which, when speaking about the human condition, we can say the medium is the message. The new forms of communicability and expression that exist when digital technology and dance merge can inspire us to imagine the infinite possibilities that such collaborative efforts between such forms of existence might inspire. New ways of seeing and perceiving the world inspire us to reimagine what we think of as irrelevant. The act of rendering relevant the irrelevant is the catalyst through which we can reimagine and subsequently reshape the landscape of human interactions. 

on teaching/learning...

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. ~Ray Bradbury


I'm not really a fan of uncalculated risks. A calculated risk means analyzing yourself, sizing up your competition, and calculating your odds. If you really want it, you'll get it, and the odds will be in your favor because you've worked hard to get them in your favor. Learning by doing. Having faith. Having the right intention. A willingness to be wrong, so you can get it right. Realizing that the learning never stops. Realizing that there is more than one way to achieve a goal.
It's been a really big challenge being schooled in one way of training gymnastics and, because I was young and naive, commiting to the idea that "this way is the best and only way" only to learn that there are many, many "ways" of doing something. Coaching gymnast is the communist countres where children are basically all brought up the same way and ahve no choice whether or not to be a gymnast presents an entirely new host of challenges. The challenges here in America are that parents have many different methods of disciplining and rewarding their children. This makes some children weak and others strong; mentally physically and spirtually.

And I have to find my own way of being in the midst of all of those different ways of being.

A cast handstand on bars is "finished" when a girl goes from a front support on the bar to a handstand position on the bar. Ideally, she ends up with a completely straight body, completely in control, able to go either forwards or backwards because she is strong/flexible enough to decide, not because she is out of control or relying on sheer momentum to get her up there. She knows exactly where she is at all times during the skill. She is there with it and completely prepared, after hours of mental, physical, and spiritual training, to hit a perfect handstand.

I'm using a cast handstand as an example of a goal, a destination, because in gymnastics, the mentality is "straight line." The mentality of the straight line. It's not only a physical thing. It's a mental and spiritual thing, too. Actually, if you can understand the mental and spiritual side of any movement or movement discipline then the physical part is very easy.

This is what I think about learning....

If you watch how a creature moves, you will gain insight into how it thinks and what it believes.
If you learn how a creature processes information, then you will gain insight into what it believes and how it moves.
If you figure out what a creature believes, then you will gain insight into how it moves and how it thinks.

And the three put together make a person/creature. If you can figure out all three, then you can teach whatever it is you want to teach. This goes for teaching others as well as teaching yourself.  

hunger games

There is a scene at the end of the Hunger Games when the gamemakers dispense a herd of “mutations,” or animal/human hybrids who have been genetically engineered to be horrible, blood-thirsty monsters. As it turns out, these killing-machines have the eyes and features of all of the predeceased children of the Hunger Games. They are essentially the spirits of the dead come back to haunt the living and seek vengeance on the remaining children in the games.

“just my fear of being caught being manifested as a person.” – reddit  

They make me think of all of the things/people that make me happy and why.                  

They make me think of all of the things/people that make me mad and why.

These things are very personal. People say oh an earthquake, a bombing, a war-crime, seeing sad orphans on TV, hearing of horrible crimes, listening to depressing statistics about hunger, famine, and lack….. they say that these things make them sad, mad, or any of the other “dark” emotions. And vice-versa about bright things….. babies crying, birds chirping, etc. etc. But I don’t feel much from things that are so far removed. And I wonder if people really do feel “dark” when they think of, hear, or see such things.

Personally, I like my emotions and feelings to be more personal, more intimate. I think that this gives me depth – makes me more human, more than just a person who laughs at what others laugh at, cry at what others cry at. More than a girl who cries at a funeral and laughs at a Disney movie – not that I don’t. But to me, emotions and feelings should be more personal than that. Otherwise who are we but shells of people who have nothing interesting to say and nothing genuine or authentic about us? 
      I can’t feel anything more than superficial tolerance for them (and by "them" I mean also myself) – I can’t connect with them or share deep things with them. I laugh at their jokes or shake my head at their misfortunes and empathize where I can, but I can’t help feeling a sense of emptiness, shallowness, callousness even. Then there are those special few, and really there are but handfuls, who are truly special. Who I can tell my deepest, darkest secrets with and share my brightest, wildest dreams with (it sounds like a relatively simple thing to be able to share your dreams, but most people will rationalize the shit out of your imagination or whip your dreams into submission).

They more than tolerate me and I more than tolerate them. They more than shake their head or chuckle at me and I more than shake my head or chuckle at them. They more than indulge me and I more than indulge them. They love me and I love them, not because some divine power says “love one another,” but because their has been some real growth-action that has happened between us for whatever reason. you have changed me and i have changed you. you have invited me to see, to appreciate differently. and i, you. 

Important: Lest I should begin to sound all high-and-mighty like I am always in touch with my feelings, my hurts, pains, loves, desires or like I always have something genuine and authentic to say, think my own thoughts, make up my own mind, I should clarify that this is definitely NOT the case.
There are times, frequently, when I forget all of these things. We all do. There are times when I forget who and what I love and why. I guess the trick, then, is to make it a point to somehow, someway remember once you have forgotten.

The Hunger Games movie was difficult to watch for the exact same reason why people (myself included) are often difficult to be around.

Everyone was so flat. I didn't feel connected in any way to any of the characters at all. There was little to no character development or motives behind many of the actions that had the potential of being heart-wrenching (like they were in the book). And they left out what was, in my humble opinion, the best part of the book.... (spoiler alert?); when the human/animal mutations return as "spirits" of the predeceased players to attack the remaining players - this is the part that made me cry in the book and what made the whole story personal - what made it all come full circle; everyone has fears/skeletons in the closet/ghosts of the past that manifest themselves and attack us in many different forms/ways – this part made me think of my own life - what I truly love and why - what I truly despise and why.... but of course if you don't take the time to develop the characters themselves then it doesn't make sense that after they are dead their second coming should mean anything at all. i remember feeling the same way about Harry Potter after having read the books - "where is everything and WHO ARE these people?! Why do they do the things they do and what motivates them to action?" Reading the Hunger Games was so personal and fulfilling; watching it felt like everyone was just going through the motions. I was pretty numb the entire time.

I hate feeling this way around people; why do you do the things you do, love the things you love, hate the things you hate? Have you let yourself be vulnerable enough to experience or feel anything real, anything at all? Or do you do and feel and say and think things because it’s what everyone else is doing and feeling and saying and thinking? Hi self, I'm talking mostly to you.  

PERSPECTIVE

I wonder if the “mutations” in the Hunger Games looked different to the different characters who were left to fend them off? There was Cato, who had been ruthless to almost all of the players. There was Peeta, who had befriended and then stabbed some of them in the back. There was Everdeen, who had done the same, but was an angel to some like Rue. Essentially, human beings are all programmed the same. We all have the capacity for brightness and goodness, but also darkness and evil. Religion teaches us this and also teaches us forgiveness, because we are all God’s children. Etc. etc. blah blah… I used to think “so why not pick just anyone to marry or the first person you date, anyone to befriend, anyone to serve as your confident, to be close with, if we are all just the same?” …….  because we're not.... sure, we are all special, but for whatever reason, we connect with some over others...  

At the end of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the killer says to his latest victim “We have the same urges, you and I, except mine requires more towels.” And tis’ true.  

I guess it’s what we do with these urges, with these emotions, how we empathize, if we forgive, how different people, activities, and experiences bring sadness, happiness, grief, and misery to us in our childhoods that determine our attractions, our aversions, who we end up with, how we connect to people, what we desire….

At the end of the Hunger Games, Everdeen, having professed her “true feelings” to Peeta in what may or may not be an authentic admission of “love,” realizes that she really loves Gale, the boy who she had grown up with. they had been hunters together, growing through and with one another for a greater cause (survival). He was home to her and home feels very different for every which person.

 Home is so personal....… 

emotional party

         There’s an improv game called Emotional Party. It’s played with a bunch of people all in the same room. One person chooses an emotion that they physically display. It could be sadness and I could cry. It could be happiness and I could hug myself, smile, and skip. It could be anger and I could stomp. It could be jealousy and I could go from person to person turning my back. It could be shyness and I could walk around looking down. Whatever the emotion is everyone has to take it on. So if I am sad, then everyone is sad. If I am happy, then everyone is happy. If I am mad then everyone is mad.

Imagine a world in which you can close your eyes and travel to a world where everyone is feeling what you are feeling? A world of anguish, despair, neutrality, ecstatic love, immense fear. Imagine if, just by closing your eyes, everyone that you loved could come with you and be enveloped by whatever emotion you were being consumed by. How would this feel? Comforting? Alienating? Constraining? Self-indulgent?

Based on the idea that a lot of times society expects us and anticipates us feeling a certain way and we generally accept that they are right. We should feel sad at a funeral, happy at the end of a Disney movie. There is a general lack of acceptance of radical emotions or expressions that do not fit this mold. We just label people crazy when their emotions are not predictable or mold-fitting. There is no place for them in society. A society of emotional obedience has led to a numb nation.  

The human survival instinct is often at odds with the pervasive longing for love, camaraderie, community, and affection. We aspire to live and to live well. But we also long to live happily with people who understand us, who elevate our egos, and carve us into something rather than nothing. I am only me because of you. You breath life into me, shape my personality. As it pertains to me, what you laugh at, what you smile at, what you hate, what you love, what annoys you, what pleases you; these all hold baring on how I act, how I think, how I imagine, and what I dream. I am you and you are me and there is a point at which, having spent so much time together, we can say that we are one consciousness. When our survival is at stake, would we risk surviving and living alone, or would we rather die in the company of others? I may be the greatest, strongest, fastest out there, but I am only made known in the presence of others. They make an audience out of millions, they make me out to be the strongest, fastest, smartest, wildest. And if there is someone out there living in obscurity who is stonger, faster, smarter, wilder than I, but who’s presence is not made known, than what is the point? Why strive to be better, stronger, or faster if not in the eye of the public? We wish to survive, and when we know we can, we wish to survive and be happy. When we are happy, we wish to be as happy as the happiest man and then some. In striving to get happier and happier, we become bitter, manipulative, raging in our pursuits of the happiest happiness of all happinesses. And then we become sad and make ourselves sick because some of the hardest, healthiest decisions to make can only be made by someone who is not at odds with themselves and others. And then we wish only to survive, because we feel bad and are sad. And once we get better and realize that we are surviving, we long to be happy; as happy as the happiest man……….  

neutrality

the same thing that makes you successful at one thing makes you successful at many things.


one of the biggest lessons i've learned lately is that "being there" is everything. i noticed this most recently while playing ultimate frisbee, tennis, playing piano, and doing yoga. 


In tennis there is a position called "ready position" which is basically knees bent,  racket held in front of you, relaxed, neutral body. The idea is that from here you can go anywhere depending on where the ball lands. you are at your most adaptable, most flexible, most neutral, most efficient, and most effective. What makes a tennis player good is how quickly (s)he can get into the position that allows him to hit the ball most effectively and efficiently and then how quickly he can return to neutral in order to anticipate the next play. This usually always involves backing up as much as possible. For me, someone who doesn't have a very strong backhand this also involves going to the back left so that the chances of me returning a play with my forehand rather than my backhand are greater.


Basically this is the same position you want to be in when you are playing ultimate frisbee; ready position. Except in frisbee you are moving a lot more. But if you are relaxed and ready to turn at a moments notice then you'll be a lot more successful.


Same thing in Bikram (hot) yoga. You do a pretty intense pose that requires a lot of concentration and heavy breathing (because it's hot), and then after the pose is over you immediately let it go and return back to "neutral" (standing still) in order to prepare yourself for the next pose.


In Wing Chun, which is a Japanese martial art, you are supposed to gaze directly into the "third eye" of your opponent, which is the space right in between your two eyes. This is so that while you are fighting you can "see" what's going on all around you because you aren't focused on any one body part. You are ready to defend an attack with the repertoire of moves that you have learned in the most efficient, effective way because you are in a "neutral" position; just like yoga, just like tennis, just like frisbee.


When you are playing the piano and you want to play a chord progression you can use inversions to make the progression easier to play so that you have to move your fingers as little as possible in order to hit the right notes. This is the same concept as ultimate frisbee as tennis as martial arts as yoga; right place, right time, so you can place whatever it is you are placing (the ball, your body, the frisbee, the notes) wherever you want them to go.


I suppose the questions to ask are: what is the quickest way to get into the most neutral position I can get myself into at any one point in time, what moves (throws, returns, defenses, etc. - sport/discipline specific) do I have in my "bag of tricks" and how do these determine where I should go (ie. limitations, strengths, weaknesses).


What's the point of it all? People always say "happiness." But I don't believe that.  Someone wise once told me that my goal should be "survival." Because if you're constantly happy then you have no depth. It's ok to go off the deep end sometimes, to be incredibly high on life and then incredibly low on life, as long as you understand how to get back to neutral. Life is a series of adventures that require you to constantly assess the situation and ultimately ask yourself what is neutral and how can i get back to it.

the kings-felt year

transulcent meanderings light the fire in a thousand red carriages. Underneath them, pebbles melt into pods of fish and gallop through streams of artificial strands of dreams left untold. Woe-begotten, incensenced, and frail. Incandescent nightmares fill up an already boiling trashcan full of mixed chords and fleeting metaphors. But it's the seventh child that always bites the nail. And it's the steeping honey pan that never gets to pray. One knee folded, one eye closed. One step forward, one glance upward. A thousand strands of DNA couldn't fix this effervescent longing. Knock, knock, twitch, fall. On time and off the wall. Hitting puberty before my mother can make amends with the giant pinecone smell that envelops the sporadic jungle of my sprawled out face. Just play the kings-felt year. And hope for macabre hauntings to melt into spring. It's truly, but not rationally, jinxed, if it were to never be told it weren't unrealized. Tick, tock, mechanical garages toiling with each other in fistfights of retention. "Remember, remember," the free-grazing, but widespread shadows say. It's not the table on which the game is played that determines it's effect; it's whether or not there is any iota of doubt that the effect is determined by the game or table.

good and bad and is

What makes something good or bad? 

Fire in the Hole - Hazel

everything has a context in which it fits just perfectly. 

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire

 Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire.

The myths that we make...... the heroes, villians, monsters, and Gods that we worship and despise…. the vast unknown 

I remember the sound of dial-up AOL connecting me to the internet. I even remember the picture on the screen; a picture of the world. I remember how BIG it felt to be connected to things outside my living room from within my living room. 

What was life like when we had only nature to reconcile with?

… in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought. The Greeks made their Gods in their own image. In Greece, man first realized what mankind was. Until then, Gods had no semblance of reality. 

Before the Greeks, Gods were inhuman. 

Think the Egyptian Sphinx or other ridiculous inhuman manifestations of the divine. 

In ancient Greece, Gods were created according to the needs of society.  Sort of like comic book heros today….

     The many heroes, heroines, Gods, and demons, that have been brought to life in our comic books and our video games are simply reflections of what society needs at any given point in history. In ancient Greece, Zeus was the God of the strong, but the poor needed a God, too, so they created his companion, Justice – protector of the poor.

     Batman didn’t need society; society needed a Batman.

    We’ve been helio-centric and ego-centric. We’ve come up with formulas to describe a reality that the formulas themselves have created. We think that life operates linearly. 

      From cradle to grave; isn’t it long a stay? What is with our fascination with time functioning in an unwavering, linear way; we’re born and need to be coddled  -we’re young and living it up careless and free -we get older, get educated, and get realistic, -we get married, start a family, and breed offspring – we create some good memories and some bad memories, convince ourselves that we’re stressed and come up with different ways to deal with it, have a midlife crisis or two, maybe a second honeymoon or seven -  we get old, we watch as the world turns, we die. Along the way we create memories, try and instill ethics in our offspring and others, find solace in expression and in different people, things, and places that make us feel not insignificant. Really, though, we are very insignificant. Beginning to end. Child’s pose to Savasana. People have developed many allegories that simulate the idea of punctuated time. The reality is that no one knows what happens after we die. Even an Alex Grey painting whose lines suggest abstract things like infinity and interconnectedness, is punctuated by the borders of the canvas on which it rests. 
     Life only progresses accordingly, predictably, conventionally, and inevitably if we think that it does. No one knows what happens after we die and timelessness is both a reality and an illusion depending on the scope of your magnifying glass. The “reality” of time; the illusion that existence is something other than ad infinitum. Ironically, the breaking down of a workday, a workweek, a human life, the history of the world etc. etc. into increments punctuated by the hand of time is both rational and irrational, necessary and completely absurd. 

What must the world be so that man may know it?

Are math formulas descriptive of actual reality or do math formulas create reality?

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse is the phenomenon in which a wave function appears to reduce to a single state after interaction with an observer. In simplified terms, it is the reduction of the physical possibilities into a single possibility as seen by an observer.

      Upon interaction with an observer, the object is reduced from many possibilities to a single possibility. This is how we process, how we make sense of a world of infinite possibilities. What are the infinite possibilities? What are the opportunity costs? What are the trade offs? There really are an infinite number of possibilities and saying yes to one thing means saying no to many, many others. That's really scary if you're not disciplined. But it can be really blissful if you are. 

I imagine that this is a lot like paradigm shifts in science….

Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic.

We need stability, but we long to be free. We need truth and create Gods and superheroes who epitomize ethics and honesty, but really we have no clue what those things are.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re not the center of the world…

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?:  Plastic…asshole." 
- George Carlin 
      Really, what’s the point of pondering such things? Well, as we get older and as we begin to accept punctuated time within the scope of a reality ad infinitum, we’ll inevitably have to make some big decisions based on the reality that our time is limited..... like whether or not and whom to get married to, whether or not we believe in such things as love, where to live, where to work, whether to explore or settle down, which ethics we believe in, and what we want to teach our children. 
     Much of our happiness appears to be dependent on other people. People say "you have to make yourself happy before you make others happy." Or "no one can make you feel something you don't want to feel." Or "if you can be alone with yourself then you'll never be alone." These things are true, but it is also an act of bravery, a courageous act of love to let yourself be effected by another person. And there's an hourglass sitting on all of our tables. Scarlet O'hara realized she loved Rhett after he had already expended a lifetime loving and waiting for her, but by that time his exasperated response was "Frankly my Dear, I don't give a damn." 


Is it better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all?


      Thinking about science, about mythology, about the Gods, Heroes, and Villians who animate our history as things that we - humans - have created in response to our needs, wants, wishes, and desires, is pretty liberating. What it means is that if society can have such a huge imagination then so can I - I can imagine a way of life that is beautiful and wonderful and not full of "shoulds." If even logical, rational, concrete domains like scientific truth and math formulations are the products of paradigms, then I can create my own way of being.    


       I hope that at the end of the day, I remember that life is not necessarily linear and that just because I’ve become comfortable with a given situation doesn’t mean that it is my only option.  Fear is the opposite of love. I hope that no big decision I make is made out of fear, with eyes and ears closed to the beatings of my own heart.