Listen to the hummingbird.

Listen to the hummingbird.

Listen  to the hummingbird.

Whose wings you cannot see

Listen to the hummingbird

Don't listen to me.

Listen to the butterfly

Whose days but number three

Listen to the butterfly

Don't listen to me.

Listen to the mind of God

Which doesn't need to be

Listen to the mind of God

Which doesn't need to be

Don't listen to me.

Listen to the hummingbird

Whose wings you cannot see

Listen to the hummingbird

Don't listen to me

Leonard Cohen.

Listening to the humming bird

I was lying in my bath, eyes closed, listening to Leonard Cohen's last album "Thanks for the dance".

I got out, got dried, got dressed.

I was reading academic articles on my phone, filing them for future reference....

As so often, the act of choosing boxes for ideas, becomes tortuous...

So there I am being orderly, working on three conference submissions for the end of the week, with people in four different countries.  

We had pretty much sorted out the author combinations, the lenses through which we would be observing our contexts.

Or at least I thought that we had...

We could have stopped there. 

But the more we look, the more we see.

But the more we speak, the more we hear.

But the more we know, the less we know.

The choices of lenses appeared to be changing daily.

Over time more connections and disconnections appear. 

As we work together from our for ever changing respective positions, the more we are asking ourselves about whose voices are foregrounded, whose names are named, whose stories are told, whose languages are heard, whose translations are accepted and what forms best represent a momentary convergence of divergent sense making.

I go and find a screenshot of a quotation shared in Maha and Shyam's article:
Bonds of difference, participation as inclusion.

We have a deadline, that is straightfoward.

We have a word and time limit that is straightforward.

We can rest in peace, there will be a moment when it/they will be pasted into a dialogue box.

Then the fun starts...

How shall we perform polyphony?

How shall we represent complexity?

Who is we? 

We are the world.

Pffff....

USA for Africa...proudly presents:

Since when was America, Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, China, Russia et al there for Africa? 

Well they have been there for all that Africa could be exploited for, minerals, territory, slaves for the cane.

• The New Scramble for Africa: how China became a partner of choice
• Russia and the new scramble for Africa.

Globally then, « we are the world. »

I note the NASA perspective of this, their globe, in the intro to the "We are the world video".

That's it: Trump inadvertently speaks truth, SPACE FORCE:

Star Trek was always a projection of power....a military project.

Those ages, past, present, future of heroic discovery, exploration, exploitation....

I find an article about Bruno Latour's theatrical performance  entitled "Moving Earths."

I am reminded of our co-performance at a conference in Krakow which attempted to express 

"Lived experience of connected practice." recounted here by my friend Teresa.

Is theatre a means to enable Polyphony? 

What is the difference, actually, between a formal lecture in an amphitheatre and a theatrical performance in an amphitheatre? 

"All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify."

Erving Goffman.

Dismembering complexity.

I am working with others on a book chapter.

We are faced with the impossibility of dismembering a complex entanglement of relationship-reality for the sake of academic convenience.

Must we accept that form trumps content?

We write that we are not able to comply with such a simplification of our complex reality.

We hope that they will understand (accept our divergent realities).

We are working on a book chapter with one or is it two or three or four colleagues, and trying to untangle who is lead author, who is co-author, who is credited as being co-author.

We hope that they will understand (accept our realities).

Well we hope, and sometimes we are accepted for what we are for a moment.

Authentically Insoumis....

Taking a few mindful steps back, I express myself with a higher level of abstraction than words enable.  

It's not a planned methodological choice, it comes as a spontaneous doodle.

I draw myself engrossed in nature. 

I sense not fragmentation but fractalisation, belonging, a being grounded, down to earth.

I find an article: « The Planet: An emergent matter of spiritual concern. »  

When I speak of changing the world, I am not thinking of a globe.

Planetary concerns are beyond me.

I am thinking of the world in and within which I have made meaningful relationships.

I am not viewing from above.  I am not looking for global reach. I am looking for local impact.

I am viewing from within and mapping meaning here to find my path through my improbably forested world.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Albert Einstein

There it is, I scribble my wordless world onto a page.

I feel the hesitation, I take time to depict neurones sparking.

I am seeing grey matter becoming transformed into green matter, I am seeing forest and feel belonging.

There is no would, there is a strange will.

I can't really claim authorship, ownership, choice.

Lines of interdepence, lines of communication, an ecosystem of reflection.  

I am, no, on reflection, I is only being, here reflected in this abstract chaotic world.

It would be so much easier to reduce complexity of creation and claim control, claim responsibility.

It is beyond me.

I feel no desire to sign it off.

Signing, signifying, signing, signifying possession, signifying power, signing words, signing facile meaning, signing order, signing posts, signing authenticity, signing with a signature, an individual signature.

"If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos -and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I am suddenly reminded of Criss-crossing  of the insanity of order, of Book-Keeping.

Then my mind was fluttering from moment to moment, from order to disorder.

Body without organs...

I am not @sensor63.

@sensor63 is.

@sensor63 is disembodied.

@sensor63 is a node on an electronic map.

@sensor63 is an avatar lacking in human failing.

Oh gawd, what have I gone and said now.
(pretentious git)



Lines of flight.

What the fuck was my butt doing sticking to the ceiling? (He notes that @sensor63 would use the word "butt" but I wouldn't)

From where I was floating, I had a pretty dramatic view of where I had been lying.

I was not at all prepared for what I saw.

The body below, "my" body, was apparently lifeless.

"My" life, if that were the appropriate term was elsewhere.

To be accurate, I, my life, me, we were trying to reason how it was that I was out of my/the body down there.

I felt a little queasy, to be honest.

I felt that I was going to be violently sick. Perhaps it was airsickness?

I would have thrown up on the bed, but then it occurred to me that without my body vomit would be futile.

Nope, I wouldn't be able to vomit my guts from a lifeless corpse.

For that is what I feared.

I was...er, my, body had left me in the lurch.

I was, to put it crudely...dead.

I was overtaken with sudden panic.

"Shit, I am dead."

"I don't want to be dead."

"I don't want to be on the fucking ceiling."

"I don't want to be able to fucking fly."

Flying in my case, was non/undirectional, I was fucking stuck.

Jealousing Kafka.

At least fucking Kafka could crawl across the ceiling.

#rhizo16 metamorphosis

Une vidéo publiée par @sensor63 le 12 Mars 2016 à 1h44 PST

I felt alone (without my body), disorientated, and frankly desperate.

I don't remember now how it happened.

The man who fell to earth.

I fell to earth.

I heaved a sigh of relief.

If I were alive, well, the impulsion that had given me "wings" didn't let me be...as before.

I was clearly other, the other that I had always been vaguely aware of.

It was the other who beat me up inside to sign my own alienation.

It repressed, was I depressed, subjected, confined, undead.

Living with the fear of others...

I was evidently extremely alive.

They looked at me with startled eyes.

They listened intently.

I could do nothing to control IT.

There were moments of paranoia, charisma felt a prison.

I longed for silence, for semblance of faceless functioning.

Turn to fucking page 5 exercise 6...that was beyond me.

I would have loved to be able to do that.

I couldn't do it.

I couldn't fucking do it.

I would have done it joyfully if I could.

Let me be a obedient catatonic robot.

I didn't have any fucking answers.

Science stumped.

The psychoanalyst visibly slumped in his office rocker, stumped.

"Make it stop." I said.

That body slumped made me pause for thought.

"He hasn't got a fucking clue." I thought.

I shall just have to deal with this nonsense myself.

"A lot of fucking good these bloody clever shrinks are", I thought.

I was fortunate.

Others, more sure of their science, might have killed me, locking me up with their fucking chemical "kindness".

I accepted a temporary knock out and accepted to deal with the fall out of falling to earth other.

In praise of walls

This was all beyond me.
http://tachesdesens.blogspot.fr/2014/01/beyond-me.html

His was a willing wall.

He, or rather the wall saved me.

I had that wall.

I could now deal with the fucking ceiling.

Write it out he suggested.

So I did.
So I do.

Writing IT out.

I wrote ream after ream of text, raging against the frenzy of it all.

I didn't want to write this crap.

"I" (it) wrote this crap.

This wasn't me.

This wasn't me at all.

"Make it fucking stop."

It was ironic really.

The publisher's rejection helped.

"Thank God for that", I thought.

The market was a welcome wall.

"I'm afraid the market is very conservative," he (the market) wrote.

"Thank Christ," I thought.

"Peace at last."

That seemed to calm IT somewhat.

I could move on without the bloody machine being always present.

I turned my energy to more tangible boundaries.

Mountains make for wonderful, unforgiving, walls.

I didn't want to die for a summit.

It is ironic really.

I had always been so frustrated at my inability to maintain scribbling.

It was there waiting for cracks in the structure to make its assault.

It is still there today.

I know IT is there.

IT, I live easily with now.

I have learnt to live with IT.

I am familiar with IT.

I make no attempt to understand.

There is no point.

I am other.

Acceptance.

I have no wish or ability to pretend that I never floated my butt on the ceiling.

It wasn't a dream.
It wasn't a hallucination.
It is my reality.
It is here now in black and white.
I have said it now.

I know that what they were saying in their confusion and fear was normally ill-placed.

They will know the unfamiliar soon enough.

On the borderline.

I wasn't sick, a case to be diagnosed...borderline we are certainly.

If only more were to admit their fucking "borderlineness!"

If only more were to admit the myth of rational control.

The controllers are fucking insane.

We have an insane waltzing system.

Is this the last waltz darling?

Acceptance

IT is not easy to define, to put into boxes, to name.

Where I would rail against the lines of the boxes that were presented to me, now I explore their frames.

Where I would beat my head against their fucking dumb system, I am more forgiving.

Life and death frame our humanity.

What is the essence of "life" is immuable, inhuman, unthinking, uncaring, unknowable.

Love gives us a porous, membran(c)e of hope and humanity.

If I rail against this fleshy cage, I accept it for now.

What is @sensor63 if not a machine?

I remain bound to thought, to making sense.

I forgive @sensor63, I live with it.

I am no longer stuck to a ceiling.

I walk airly and revel in ITs nonsense.

There is sense in nonsense.

There is no sense without IT.


Footnote.

I take a few steps back and read what has been mapped mechanically.

I think, I wonder.

I am the one that wonders.

I is Simon.

Tapping Sources. Mapping Sounds.

Poetic latitude.

He notes that he has jumped up three lines on the map...

He couldn't do that otherwise.

He is aware of rewinding his thoughts.

Where is the order in this?

He keeps wanting to escape the page.

What space would these words take up?
How might they move?
What would be their destination?

He keeps wanting to transcend the physical space.

Hazel Groves.

There is a grassy bank above him. 

He hesitates an instant. 

What is the name for the densely grown trees up there? 

He knows it. 

He knows it. 

It escapes him. 

The word escapes him.

He makes space, why does he do so?

He cuts up the lines to give them air.

What are those trees? 

What are those trees?

The word comes back to him. 

They are hazel. 

It is a hazel grove.

Hazel growth, hazel grove.

The place is not quite as it seems to you.

The place is not literal.

The place is inhabited.

It contains signs that only he can read.

Mapping sources

There is a bag of hazel nuts that his daughter is collecting. 

Not there, not there.

She is at home.

NOT
now.

NOT
now.

She is years younger in another home.

He regrets the hazel hedge in that other home.

He regrets its vibrant growth.

He regrets its vibrant growth.

Try as he may, he is captured an instant by the hazel grove.

He is its prisoner.

He returns to the page.

It will not open. 

It will not open.

There is anger in his gestures as he types the letters. 

How can you hear that sound? 

He stops an instant, ignores the writing implements and takes a sound recorder.

That's it. 

You will hear my pace now. 

The peace of my fingers typing on the board.

Far away from the hazel grove. 

Far away from the hazel grove.

The sound is foregrounded.

The sou...he stops. 

The os....he stops.

The sound of the fingers (he typed finders and corrected it) will be yours. 

How will you know to make sense of the rhythm.

(how many bloody times does he get that word's spelling wrong?)

How did I get here?

He wonders....

I was setting out to make a map.

I had the pencils ready.

They appear unimportant now.

There is so much to show.

There is so much to tell you.

There is ....

He hesitates and wonders.

"Is it finished now?"

"Is it finished now?"

Will that be the map?

How will you find me?

How will you follow me?

You shall not.

You shall not.

I am .....(he hesitates)

I am .....(he hesitates)

With you in this silence, this silence, these finger beats, fingers beating a hard surface.

It is a lie.

It is a lie.

It is a lie.

We are standing together.

You are behind me.

Une vidéo publiée par @sensor63 le 19 Mai 2016 à 2h28 PDT

Looking at the hazel grove.

It exists now.

In our map.

It is over now.

He stops the recording.

He hesitates, pencil resting on the surface.

He looks at the implements in the metal bucket.

He hesitates.

Tapping Sounds.

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every directions at once; I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence... You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.
By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.
Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says 'I' means something different by it from what every other person means. What is 'I' to me is only 'you' to you...
In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound... the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings' feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life.”

― Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Foul Brood.

They were the "Monsters", a curious assembly.

"What are you doing Simon?"

"I'm playing with the Monsters."











Monsters All.

The gang leader, Yip, was a pink poodle who only stood.

His side-kick was Little Bear, a small, rather insignificant looking, orange eraser bear with lopsided ears.

The main body of the monster crew was made up of rubber dinosaurs of varying vintage.

Brown Brontosaurus, Bronto, was a good deal smaller than two yellow Ankylosaurus who had developed abilities of flight - hence Wings and Little Wings.

Over time, each creature had revealed individual gifts and talents however unlikely.

There is no respect for paleontological accuracy in child's play.

The only concession to probability was the monster who drove the Jeep.

Only Yip could do that.

The dinosaurs wouldn't fit into the driver's seats due to issues of anatomy.

Little Bear was just too goddam little to reach the pedals.

For whatever reasons, these inanimate creatures became heroes to months of incongruous adventure.

Their heterogenity, the very unlikelihood of a pink poodle being friends with:

• Stegosaurus
• Tyrannosaurus Rex
• Horns the Triceratops 

stimulated creative thinking and made for interesting battles.

Child's play is nothing if not inclusive.

Shock of the scale.

I stood there looking up.

I was dwarfed and not a little disappointed.

The brontosaurus skeleton saured above my head and took up a large part of the Natural History Museum's ground floor gallery.

Scale mattered now.

There was no sign of any Jeep.

There was not a pink poodle to be seen.

I put away childish things.

Natural History had murdered the monsters.

I returned home to play with Action Men.

The monsters were dumped in a box.

None of the Action Men could drive the Jeep due to issues of anatomy.

Monsters All.

"You want a whip?"

"We have a whip."

"You want Marxism?"

"We have Marxism. We do a special offer. You can have Trotskyism for only 30% extra." 

"You like dinosaurs?"

"Come to Dinopark."

"Out now! Steven Spielberg's Jurassic World."

"BUY THE TSHIRT!"


Foul Brood.

"Well why the hell can't we have dinosaurs with poodles?"

"NOOO!! The Tyrannosaurus Rex will rip off the bloody poodle's head!"

"You can never trust a carnivorous dinosaur with pets."

After a good deal of soul-searching the monsters decided that they could live happily together.

The Tryannosaurus was simply misunderstood.

He might be a bit clumsy at times but you just had to avoid the slashing tales, the claws, and the vicious teeth. 

After much wrangling they decided on a name for their tribe.

They would be the "Foul Breed."

It gave them an outlaw sort of mystique.

It recalled swarms of bees.

Well, a rather sickly swarm of bees.

Even this sickness was turned to something positive.

They were a virus.

Viruses are powerful.

Outlaw viruses spread.

The Foul Brood group took on a heroic importance.

It was quite out of scale with reality.

From another perspective...

They were only toys.

Their arguments, their battles, their icons, their likes, their dislikes, their victories matttered not a jot.

“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come -- ” Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett

A child's sighs.

Brownish greyish Irish sea, empty beach, deserted pier, assorted amusement arcades, John Lewis's department store...






Mrs Scottner's 360° view from her house at the top of Blackpool Tower is exceptional if somewhat mundane.

Despite the undoubted inconveniences: high heating bills, lack of garden, mass of tourists in high season, the long lift-ride to pick up the milk and the Blackpool Herald, Mrs Scottner would never imagine living elsewhere.

Mrs Scottner and Blackpool Tower go together like cheese and crackers, cockles and mussels.

Don't try to Google her.

You will most probably not get any hits.

Invisible to anyone who might search for her, Mrs Scottner has now been Blackpool Tower's sole resident for the past forty seven years or so.

Mrs Scottner has been extraordinarily resilient...

A child's eyes. 

I can still remember the early designs for her house.

I could probably still rebuild her house with the same Lego bricks that I used when I was a child of five.

I remember pretty much the assembly of the framework, the windows and the flat roof.

If I think back, I can still remember that Mrs Scottner and I had long conversations.

"Who are you speaking with Simon?"

"I am speaking with Mrs Scottner."

"Who is Mrs Scottner?"

A child of five sighs. 

"She's the lady that lives at the top of Blackpool Tower."

"But nobody lives at the top of Blackpool Tower."

A child of five sighs.

Adults are so literal.

I was reading an adult article yesterday.

It was entitled : 2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction.

As I was reading, a few lines caught my attention. They were written by Ben Lerner in an interview in The Believer,

"My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another."

A little further on Jonathan Sturgeon, the article's author writes:

"All of these novels point to a new future wherein the self is considered a living thing composed of fictions. Although critics will endlessly retread tired discussions concerning fiction vs. reality (and therefore the exhausted conversation about “realism”), that isn’t really what’s at stake here. What’s happening is that new novels — like the abovementioned 10:04, The Wallcreeper, and My Struggle — are redistributing the relation between the self and fiction. Fiction is no longer seen as “false” or “lies” or “make-believe.” Instead it is more like Kenneth Burke’s definition of literature as “equipment for living.” Fiction includes the narratives we tell ourselves, and the stories we’re told, on the path between birth and death."

Is Mrs Scottner less real than I?

It has been a long time that I have known her.

I am struggling to hear her voice now.

Give me a little time...


Image credits:

Blackpool Tower at Top facing Pleasure Beach
View of Central pier from the Top of Blackpool Tower
© Copyright Eddie Reed and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2757856