funny? stupid? huh?

So I picked up a book I had once only half-read, a prescient gift from brother Andrew who knew I had been interested in Schizophrenia and the like, by the inestimable Foucault - Madness and Civilization. Trying to pick it up at the midpoint was disconcerting ... I do remember the gist of the first half, but I couldn't focus on the particulars, so I flipped back to the beginning and began again.

But this post has little to do with the book itself- rather, within it, I found a bookmark (picked up with my mother from Half Moon Books in Northampton, MA) where I had written a series of words- words I either didn't know, or sort-of knew but wanted to find the exact definition (Note: I have a tendency to know words only contextually, know them in their neighborhoods and typical sentences, and that's usually enough to get away with. However, I sometimes Iryna will ask me what a word means, and I have to admit- sheepishly, as you can imagine- that my knowledge is quite superficial, or a loose coupling at best).

Oh, the poor ice bee, in the upper left corner. Untouched for so long, frozen in a flattish sort of stasis. Wings of icy paper, marble-veined, unmoving. No one has been here in such a long while. Limbs of a dismembered poet.

It is an odd condition of this age that just about the only visitors to these realms in the last year have been bots. Not that I am sad- at least, not on account of the 'bots. I dearly love bots, hope to father a few more, robust ones, that flicker across the vast static ocean of inter-noise and do my bidding, executors of my whims. But looking over my logs, and seeing the bots' names over and over and over, I sense that there is an edge of loneliness there, of fruitless repetition... it is an abandoned factory, where machines continue to operate, assembling ghost structures... going through the motions, lifting metal that is no longer supplied, bending and cutting air like an industrial Noh theater, like sign language origami.

So I give them a little, a small offering, something to chew on. Something to reward their thankless, inexorable efforts, their nightly spidering through this vast and empty corner of the world.

So a thought occurred to me today, something interesting and unprecedented. I was standing in the bathroom, sort of half awed at the tile and silver aura of the place, and truth be told I think I had just weighed myself. If the scratched postcard of my memory is correct, the scale said 211.5 today.

In any case, it was one of those moments that you can see yourself, from outside, and I became conscious of the fact that I was looking at myself, and had just started to wonder if my self-awareness was contributing to my pose, the angles of my arms and crook of my head, as if I were posing for a scene in a book (that's what it almost felt like) and then - I sort of fell, rushing, through the veins of my own history, my own art, and the ideas I had burned through in years past. Maybe it was just all those mirrors, but thinking back on it now, I see ripples through quicksilver. Or maybe that's from the book in which I posed. And the thought was basically this: words.

It is with a slight ache to my head that I write this. I am also, truth be told, racing against a rather short-lived battery. Perhaps this is slightly metaphoric. Then again, perhaps not.

Now that I have gone and said that, I find my mind twisting around the idea of a battery. Not in the science sense, but in the Beuysian sense. You know, stored energy. Evolutionary warmth, packaged up for us in nice rolls of significant metals and active compounds. Portable spiritual ascension. You get the idea.

(And now that I say *that*, I am intrigued to find a way of making a "Beuysian Belief Network", to be the computurgical counterpart to the more common "Bayesian Belief Network". This could be some fun. Note to self, as they say.

The beginning, of course, is a drawing out of the environment, a winding-of-the-world into a shiny, spindly, silvery strand that can be shaped into the letters of description. That way, we have place, we have a grounding, we have the terra firma- which is just a way of saying confidence, I have thought recently. I know where I am, that's a good beginning of things. Not the only beginning, mind you, but a good one.

From there we usually take a step. Which direction? I have had fun playing with little pixel-sized 'bots' whose sum and total of existence is consumed with this question- which way to go? Luckily for me, I have also programmed them to leave a trail. This not only gives them place, but also a past. At least from the god-like vantage of a programmer, surveying though an LCD window all of creation. As for the pixel-bots, it's better for them not to know their own past.

So what is going on?

I am giving myself 10 minutes to recount the past few ages, and then I am off to a corner of the couch with a sketchbook and an indelible pen (beyond Confucius and his 'cross-words with a pen'... every sketched line must remain).

The sensation that rises to surface is of course, the heat. Thankfully, there is an angelic air-conditioner overhead and an altruistic little fan spinning its little molded-plastic heart out, which makes living bearable.

Edit: next day...

I missed the cutoff, as more observant readers might have guessed. Although it is somewhat understandable that the local 'maximum' - the highest profile- was the heat...

So it is, now: even deep in the evening, the sweat is a creeping sheen, a soft but anxious insistence that lingers in a moldy, patterned heat mostly just beneath the skin. Mostly, in the sense that it lies implicit, subsensual, but every here and there crawls through the pores in what I can only see in my head as an 'epidermal seep'. Summer nights in Peñasquitos, where the ebbing roar of the highway rumbles as surrogate to the Del Mar ocean... and where the meager fan casts cyclonic shadows on the ceiling, shuddering wings raised high above the heads of my wife and daughter.

Mornings find us sitting in the pools of shadow, which have always seemed to me to be leftover pockets of night. It is grey, it is cool. But the heat rolls down off the hills, it seems, during the day, and radiates into our small living room, even into the furthest furthest corner where sits my computer nest.

Recent Language Research

in progress..

• Halogen
• DadaDoDo
• Dada Engine