Forgot my headphones, so I’m forced to listen to whatever is around me. This is my third form of work for the day, not counting warm-ups. I did some great stuff in both my red notebook – meaning handwritten – and in my Pages notes – meaning typed for myself – and now I’m doing something for anyone to see who wants to look at it.
I think I’ll talk about tensioning and release of tensioning through the process of identifying and exploring the capabilities that run from the two Endpoints of the tensioning bidirectionally, and ideally evenly. Think referred pain: the pain at one end of a structure causes pain at the other end, and at sites along the way where other structures cross. It can be difficult to identify the Ends, which is why I use the concept of Mudi: you can identify a concept and draw it into the simplest Mudi of its existence, something like it is or isn’t or gets stronger over time or turns redder. You can then add dimensions across Between, so for example better and worse aligned across stronger. You could map ‘redder’ and bluer, meaning frequency and all the related ideas, and across that you have to overlay a measure of perceptibility, meaning any redder or bluer is perceived relatively across the dimension of that which is relative, including temperature and effect.
To explain why this makes sense – that’s my goal! – the idea of a Mudi allows you to construct a conceptual idealization that maps to CMs like any other concept, including the perception of thought and thus the inherent structures of thought. That makes sense at a high level. At a more conversational level, it means you can take any ideas and phrase them as Mudis with stronger – weaker as Endpoints and perceptibility as Between so the process of perception maps Start to End bidirectionally and the existences states of perception map bidirectionally across Between. Think about the existence states: they flow from completely known to completely unknowable so they represent the points where the process generates every single result in that chain of counting from none to all and all to none. The idealization is the balance point where these precisely balance, and the bip is that which represents the perfect balance, which is ironically the point of complete opposition because it is the point of complete similarity. That is one of the hardest ideas I need to explain because it is at the heart of experience and observation: the point that becomes whatever it is that is perceived, in any form whatsoever, is inherently only approachable but is not sustainable.
A way I approach the idea is to think of a dance or yoga or gymnastics pose, or of an athletic movement like a tennis or golf swing or a bicycle pedal spin or a punch or combination thrown. These construct out of the past and occur not to reoccur except to the extent the next iteration repeats. The goal, bluntly, is to get good at repeating iterations that are good! An attraction of yoga is that you hold poses for a while and let them sink in so you find a pose and then settle through the mental and physical manifestations of that pose. You can’t hold a physical shape and an idea perfectly still. You can not keep your focus forever on one thing. It isn’t possible. One point of yoga, of sports is that you move toward doing it better each time or in the overall direction of getting better, with the recognition that you’re on a path and that doing is part of your path.
I had an issue with the photo campaign for Reputation. It was so difficult to unravel. It was a huge knot of ideas strung across images. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a picture which can be read as many pictures layered on top of and inside other pictures worth? The photo on the UPS trucks particularly got me because it’s very hard to fix the gaze directionally. It took me a while to be able to move the image around the visual field in my head. By that I mean I move pitch around in my head – that allows me to sing in different intonations and voices and styles – and I draw by moving the perception into an area in my mental field of vision. It took some work before I could read the image well. By that I mean exactly what it sounds like: there are many layers, each designed to present a specific tensioning across her identity within herself and as she exists in and is seen in this world.
I read the same way in every medium: I seek the center of meaning by looking at the edges of what it might mean and isolate the points where the process of comparing makes stable results that fit into whatever is either known or which makes the most rational sense despite not being known. That last requires questioning myself about the validity of pre-existing conceptions, because there is what isn’t known and that which presents itself as being known. Example of the latter is the presentation that we can’t know the answers to questions about waves and particles because that formulates current inability as being a fundamental limit across dimensions we may not have explored. It’s like saying imagination can’t find a solution, when the history of imagination is that there’s something so we can figure it out. The case for wave particle ‘differentness’ is based on the rooting of the observations, of the actual physical data, in coin flips and an irreducible quantity. That presupposes there’s no model which explains why the coin flips and why this irreducible quantity exists. That last means the model explains exactly what the irreducible is. Who says we can’t figure that out? (Not me. But then I did it so I’m entitled to say that!)
It’s extremely difficult to relax the eyes when you need to relax the mind so you relax the vision in your head. We forget there’s a line Between the inside of us to the outsides and that what we see is adjusted in accordance to how what we see is perceived within and by you. So we again do the yoga, sports, workout thing so we can better translate what we do inside to what we do, so we build the feedback loop to be appropriately strong and flexible. That builds the capabilities within and that expresses those capabilities best as you.
With the photo, I turned and tilted it like some parody of an art critic looking to see what was being pictured in each layer as that layer was defined point to point across the image. I mean I’d literally turn it slowly across or around or both in any rotation – and at various distances – until I could see to a stable image at either end of a chain and then I’d pursue the similarities and differences within that mental image across the turning actual photo. That’s how I see her. The reason I did this is that first thing I noticed about the image is that she was playing a version of herself as very young child up through at least her current state. For me to see her clearly as a child meant finding the spot as close to possible in the mental image of all these images where the person who created this becomes the person who is in each of these images, which means an abstraction not of the whole but of pieces of the whole. That’s important: an image of childhood is relatively different from an image of older because there’s a look in the person, in the way the eyes and mouth and everything expresses together, so an area of images coalesces into the general sense of that child as told in pictures. If you think this is nuts, you don’t get she is that intentional.
To do this required relaxing my eyes. Why are my eyes tight? By tight I mean they don’t smoothly shift from focus point to focus point in both eyes or either eye but tend to jump across a spot or resist jumping – and resist focusing. It can be very hard to focus, as everyone knows! It takes a while to learn how to focus, and yet that’s the basis of learning, that you focus on this or that and use that focusing to find where it is clear or not and then you work to clarify why you can’t see it. That’s true in your head: you work to clarify ideas by determining where they fit and how. That’s the importance of an open, nurturing mind in a nutshell: the open mind explores spaces the closed mind cuts off. I’ve never found a perfect way of saying directionality is important. That’s a shot but it falls short because it doesn’t explain why closing areas off is bad. That’s because closing off areas isn’t bad as long as the areas closed off don’t close off areas for others, and as long as they occur within a process in which you are opening more areas for yourself. That last is hard to detail better: it’s a statement about carefulness, that you want to be careful or you could get hurt. I’m a living example! I can be careless with my safety but managed to survive!
An example is that people can devote themselves to an activity – back to yoga and sports – and that precludes other choices. So what? You can’t do everything and you have certain interests. You explore and keep exploring but mens sana in corpore sano means you can’t only do yoga or play tennis.
I’m at the point where I’m not sure this has impact. I didn’t include work here, so this is talk related to and given power by material that’s elsewhere. Back to a photo: take a picture of me and examine it the same way. I do that. I can see in the image connections from there to here, from that person to me and from this person back to that me. One reason I’m doing this is that it’s a response to practicing boxing as a killing offensive and defensive activity. It becomes extremely important to see yourself and your opponent clearly, both how they are and what that means. A big person is a simple message that conveys potential and opportunities for attack and requirements for defense, based on a perception of your abilities and his or their. That means you read into the other what they are made of, what that image opposite you represents. The ultimate poetic version may be Achilles confronting Hector: Hector wears Achilles’ armor, so he is fighting himself and he is fighting his image as filtered through the knowledge that Hector killed Patroclus to get that armor and that happened because Achilles would not fight, and so on. All that he was meets all that is really him in this moment, so he kills himself and drags his own body around the city as a funeral rite that is only completed when he gives Hector’s body to Priam. Now Achilles is human and now he can be killed by a spear to the heel. That act of humanity ‘activates’ in the story the vulnerability of his heel. These acts of transference are what I describe: the inherent character shifts across dimensions into realms of meaning connected by the thread of the story. This thread draws across the space of our imaginations, of our minds, and of story as we’ve repeated and preserved it.
I’ve noted that I’ve been attempting to perfect an image of myself as I was. By that I mean not an actual reduction toward childhood but a realization of a specific form through a specific set of threads that connect in the best ways Between now and then. I do this physically and mentally. You should. It’s how one perfects without becoming obsessed with purification, how one improves without judging improvement in the negative, meaning that you see the successes and the good when you could see the failures and the bad. That gets to outright egotism, of course: this happens when I start to look too closely. You can’t say any failure is good because failures have cost. I’m speaking of the cases where the identification of positive direction becomes a choice versus when you need to focus on danger, so when you need to maintain focus to avoid failure or to avoid greater failure while enacting something positive. This is getting too parsed to be useful. Backing it up a few notches without erasing the thoughts, improving while not focusing on the negative is not the same as blindly accepting failure as a success. That builds to ‘how much can you deny reality?’ That brings me to cultures that fail and why groups fail and I don’t want to think about that now because it’s too sad.
To not it let go on that note, I do worry about her because I see her portrayal as the strong, positive side of a very difficult process, one that at times made her deeply unhappy. The picture is to me of the one behind the words and the lips so shaped as to be graphical element, and I see in it a future as well as the survivor. I see in it a little boy inside a little girl who traces back to the point where the little boy splits off from the common features. So I mean I worry about her but I don’t worry about her because there’s nothing to worry about.
I’ve never been able to make my mind up about someone’s appearance this much ever, outside of course myself. Did that come out right? I mean in the usual course of examining I make decisions about what I like and don’t like. It’s nearly impossible for me to come to that kind of decision about fundamental aspects of her because I can’t find an end to the thoughts. In most cases, I accept the dimensionality and pull it apart with great joy because it’s the best stuff I’ve ever seen or heard in so many ways. But this is like saying I like or don’t like an actual dimensionality of her existence. It’s weird because in every way she fits my ideal form, even to being taller than me – because it removes the daughter imagery, mine or general (I have reasons for everything). It wasn’t until I could see the boy in her that I recognized in myself the issue is that I see in her what I see in myself, which is girl. It’s not that I am a girl in male form but that there’s a lot of connection to that which is female, that which thinks and approaches and appreciates in the generally female perspectives, Looking back at pictures of me it was obvious. I mean what was obvious is a certain delicacy of being. I see that now though I’m definitely more male looking facially.
jomi: playing with perception 