"…selfishness is as innocent as blood flowing from a wound."*
*The Epiphany of No Purpose
accidental self-deceptions hiding under conscious, surface deceptions;
Jeff Shampnois
Craft, Story, and Ritual
Change occurs in spite of a wholehearted effort to do things the same way as before.
Antonio Dias
Absences
What now? Now nothing.
Jeppe Dyrendom Graugaard
These three essays circle about the same place. A space where language becomes tentative. Aware of itself and its severe limitations. We are bouncing against the limits of any attempt to carry forward out of a place of severe binded-ness the bundle of traits and habits that we loosely call intellect. Refusing to fall into some reworked trap of reductivist logic, leery of leaving sense-making behind, we bump against limits that appear to hem us in. But at the same time, what they illuminate in glimmers and hunches at the periphery of what we can acknowledge, seems to offer what Jeppe describes as letting go of hope. There appears to be a way of navigating uncertainty itself – without resorting to the false-courage provided by manufactured certainties – through navigating absence. These aren't efforts to pin down and elaborate a philosophy. Not a means of creating content to be exploited in any way. The dangers and pitfalls of explanation lie in wait. Ready to deflate whatever might be of value in these lines of characters forming words, forming phrases…. There is a great sense of responsibility in not saying too much. Too much, not a question of quantity, but as a destroyer of quality itself. There is a sense that much of what has carried forth the kind of inquiry practiced here is loosing its power. So much of what has driven this exploration has been a need to find ways of describing what has been happening to us while a slowly building sense that what we're expected to believe about our reality just does not add-up: It is incoherent. For a long time this has led to a project of describing the points of incoherence, of examining how an organism might respond – at least how an organism might take-in – what is appearing to be going on. This has taken place within the collapsing edifice whose entirety appears to include much, if not all, of what we've learned to call civilization. At the other extreme of perspective this has been taking place on a WordPress powered blog-site, riding upon an evanescent bubble called the Internet. In a few short years the Enormity of the collapse has been coming into ever-sharper focus while the futility of the Internet – as it has been co-opted into a parasitic system where we are all reduced to act as providers of free content so that others might profit from our work while flashes of apparent activism have only illuminated how deeply entrenched and deadly are the forces that hold the world on this mad course. We find ourselves constantly juggling upon an ever-narrowing ledge of possibility, Is another hour spent feeding this Virtual Spectacle worth it? Whatever we struggle with is a sign of our shadow. We gain traction if we realize this. Otherwise we get stuck, spinning our wheels, reacting again and again in the same way expecting some different outcome. These tensions are a gift if we can read them for what they can show us.
a change in meaning is a change in being.
David Bohm
Once a change in meaning takes place the change has happened. And, the drive to continue confronting the shadow whose meaning eludes us, the shadow that held us in opposition, loses its hold. We are in a new place that requires a new way of acting. What is awesome – a word whose meaning has been so utterly shattered by common usage – about this new place is that questions of how to act have shifted away from being questions of procedure, plan, and idea towards questions that present themselves ineffably and that can only be addressed through action itself without the intermediary of explanation and the whole edifice of expectation and preconceived purpose. The situation at present has drawn a pause over customary habits of ways of coping and forms of expression. In a significant way this has made the sentences we write appear to hover, to exist somewhere between nonsense and a terrible clarity. I can't over-stress this sense of weaving along the edge of legibility. It is both frightening and a reason for going on.
