Skin in the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_in_Nazi_camps

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”― Gilles Deleuze 

There were  25,000 results. 
I read them all. 
I made a synthesis. 
I compiled the bibliography. 
It would be my life.
It would be my life's work.
It would be my life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
My life.
26,000 results.
59,000 results. 

It is time for taking stock.

[I instantly feel alienated by the expression "taking stock". We are forever confronted by fucking commerce. The small print on the long contract. I write my age then delete it. Numbers are for ever an annoyance.]



I find myself here...

I find myself inviting Deleuze, Arendt...he tales off.

He rather wishes that they would go away.

He notes how they, he are kept under tabs...

He sees himself moving from here to preview. 

He reviews his path.

He thinks about deleting the photo. 

He reasons that he will leave a blank space.

He wonders how best to represent space.

He finds a riddle, written by a student, on a black board. 

He settles for that.

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.” 
― Gilles Deleuze


I find myself grouping together lines of reflection...

I barely glimpse them, I barely read them. 

I rush on by.

It is not the words that count it is the movement...

...an impulsion beyond.

At times I come back and I think: "What the fuck?"

At times I know why the answer is the fucking question.

“According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.” 
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

What explains this impulsion? 

This colour?

They appear little by little here, in interaction, dialogue with people, images, videos, quotes, tweets, scribbles, blog posts, clicks. 

They order themselves here for orderly? consideration in a determined flow.

It is the haphazard which reveals meaning.

Old words pop up as chorus.

Those deleted rest as meaningful as those that remain.

Those deleted rest as meaningful as those that remain.

Will they remain in peace?

To be present. 

Here.


“This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.” 
― Gilles Deleuze


Takingstock.

I steal my words.

How is it I know that I am worn by the suit and not the other way round?

I am made anxious keeping up its appearance.

I walk down the street.

I am anonymous.

I belong.

I feel a longing, a dull longing.

Branded, a superior cut, I have a fine sheen.

I am made for measure.

Take a knife, slash, let me bleed.

Be careful not to stain, to bruise my flesh.

Skinned, tenderised, jointed.

Painlessly killed.

I cook, a Sunday roast. 

LIVESTOCK, DUMBLEDORE AND I.

Made to Measure.

ROLL, ROLE, ROLLS, 

BOXES, BOOKS,BORDERS, WALL.

CURTSIES,COUNTRIES, COFFINS, CALL.

DOLLARS DOLLARS DOLLARS.

@laura_ritchie @NomadWarMachine And the credit there on attached by princes. pic.twitter.com/ng4JyUu85J

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) February 20, 2017

View my Flipboard Magazine.

@telliowkuwp yes. I suppose there lies my path. Not able to happily decorate relative reality. pic.twitter.com/NHQDIrzSoH

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) February 20, 2017

Piles of stuff.

Elite parlour games.

Anyone for tennis?

Scrabble

What are you?

The forgotten.

R. E. S. P. E. C. T.













OBJECTS. SUBJECTS.

“Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement” 

― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Submission.

Insubordinate.

In memorIam.

Academic form 

Writing the unreadable untext

The evils of words ...

Finds new impulsion here...

@tellioconnect drumpfff pic.twitter.com/B3s6UB4FKM

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) February 20, 2017

Netscape.

I had better get a quote in here from (on?) Deleuze and Guattari:

"The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is ‘striated’, or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad 

space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). (Massumi, 1988, p. xiii)"

Quoted by Sian Bayne.

What's happening? 25,000 @telliowkuwp #lesmauxdesmots #netnarr "The real can only be expressed by the absurd." VALERY P. pic.twitter.com/rJAte8SaVZ

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) February 19, 2017

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” 

― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

It will suffice for now...

Blear and loathing.

"Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant." 

Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.


"I find myself here."

There is no question about it.

"I find myself here."

It suddenly occurred to me the other day.

That that hadn't been me.

It was a relief. 

"I'm sorry, you don't follow?"

Well, I am telling you...

Now...

I was...a relief.

I had been hidden, dissimulated, drowned out in drear.

It was tiresome.

Then I was there, bleary eyed, somewhere near.

"I find myself here."

It was an unfamiliar sound.

Breath as plague.
Breath as swarm.

Breath as resistance.

"I find myself here."

I scrolled.
I scrolled.
I scrolled.

Nothing seemed to connect.

Nothing seemed to connect.

I fall prey to blear and loathing.

"I lose myself there."

I can't go on.

I am lost.

I am nothing.

I am carrion.

Rotting.

It wasn't me.

No, I am telling you.

That wasn't me.

I recognise myself in this distance.

"I find myself here."



Footnotes.

I find myself here on flitting through a post of Terry Elliot.

"Self loathing is a subset of resistance: all honour to Laura Ritchie and Steven Pressfield."

I find it difficult to delve deeply.

He links to an article of Steven Pressfield.

I find it difficult to delve deeply.

I walk with Pressfield an instant.

I get as far as "One."

"So the next time you hear that self-loathing voice in your head, remember two things: One, that voice is not you."

I nod my head in agreement.

Getting to "Two" is a step too far.

"remember two things."

I don't take too kindly to imperatives...

Fuck that Mr Pressfield.

I find something about "original dreams" and "good signs."

Oh what bollocks.

I may be hasty in my judgement.

I find myself here.

Fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Ditch the post.

Self-satisfied twaddle. 

Ten minutes.

Pitch the sale.

Five minutes.

Found a photo.

No time for fancy.

Self-conscious reflection.

Post it anywhat, anywhereway.

Someone will ask.

Someone will wonder.

"Why?"

Found the hook.

Five minutes.

Slash.
Stop.
Sentence.
Over.

Sum of our parts (not).

Dead, quite dead, under the earth, boxed, buried, decomposed, yet they are wholly alive.

They have taken on new life, they accompany me, without fail.

We speak all the time.  They come with me to work, on holiday, and are present at special occasions.

Far from mortality being a finality, our relationship had been transformed.

We are bonded by story and soul.

I do a quick search of their presence here.

I (re)connect with family:

Suspend Disbelief.

Life Beyond the Meme.

Book-Keeping

Band of Hope

I (re)connect with teachers:

Settling old sores.

I (re)connect with friends:

Absent Hands

Joke Candles

Navigating By Stars

Our lives our intertextual.

"People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around..."

Terry Pratchett.

He was at least ninety years old.

He had been suffering this way since he was nine.

"My father always said that I was less handsome than my brother."

He was eaten up from the inside by a parental parasite.

Our bodies are fictional.

"Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind....The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up."

Marcel Proust.

I looked at myself in the mirror and I said to myself - that can't be me, but it was.

It was a frightful recognition.

I was thinking that there were pages unwritten that I was reluctant to turn.

I don't want this story, I don't want this story.

In writing, I realise that indeed it is the story which is writing me and not the other way round.

I thought of my elders and they offered me a knowing look.

It wasn't much consolation.

I fell upon a passage from Toni Morrison's Beloved.

How can we ever imagine a body free from (his) stories?

"In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver - love it, love it and the beat and the beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. This is the prize."

"The me you know."

There was something ironic about the title of Maha's blog post.

I am continuously discovering me's that I didn't know.

Some of those me's...well meh...I would rather not have known.

I click on the link.

"People close to me in person seeing me as something different from how I view myself as a whole person. Because they don’t read me. And that’s a big part of who I am and what I think and how I feel and how I process my life. Do they really know me if they only know my behavior and not my thoughts?"

People read us all the time, not just our words.

How can I even venture to know someone without living, those readings?

I am reminded of reading an article of Dave Snowden

"Humans in effect are able to adopt multiple identities in parallel as well as in sequence. I can be father, brother, husband or son and my behaviour will alter according to the identity that I am assuming. I am increasingly convinced that in a human system it is the identities that are the agents not the individuals"

I suspect that the text is written from the perspective of a man who feels he is able to "assume identities."

We are constantly dressed, trussed up even, with the identities that others thrust upon us.

It strikes me that we are incapable of seeing ourselves as a "whole person".

How on earth can we expect that any other might view us as a "whole person"?

None of us are whole.

"By day each soul must walk within its shadow. Only night can make us whole again..."

Nicolas Gordon

I think of my parents.

At no time would I have been able to know them as "whole persons."

They were my parents.

They were at times wholly present for me.

Any attempt to consider them as "whole persons" is dependent on imagination.

Crisscrossing stories...

I think of the party for the  anniversary of my uncle's passing.

My story was one in a crowd of volumes which crisscrossed.

To each person present the person absent was wholly alive.

To the person absent, each person present must have represented a vital part of his life story.

It is a theme that I realise I visited in a blog post entitled "Story Bound"

I find myself quoting myself.

"Not noise bound, their stories were miscellaneously entangled. Their personal footnotes were hidden and unimportant."

It suddenly occurs to me that even here, in this MY blog I am lost.

I am incapable of keeping the stories in order, under control.

They have ganged up on me.

I can hear them skulking in a corner, complaining how once written they are left to their own devices.

I threaten them with erasure, then realise that will be no guarantee of closure.

They have escaped, gained their independence.

I return to Maha's blog post.

"The me you know"

"It makes me think about how my embodied self could never live up to my (albeit still authentic) digital self."

I find comments that I wrote on Facebook:

"Fortunately your readers can live up and beyond what any embodied self could ever do. Cos we are distributed - always."

"Reckon we need to think about movements more than about bodies."

There was a question from Bonnie Stachowiak:

 "I'm curious about this and wonder if you could share more of what you mean (re: movements).."

Dem bodies

We are not the sum of our parts.

Once born we are never whole.

We are forever seeking our other halves, our lost youths, our salvation.

Once dead we are never soley bones.

While written we are never soley words.

Our bodies, our lives, our identities, our stories escape us.

They become the (be)longings of others who pick them up in bits, to be reused or abused.

Dem bones

Ezekiel connected dem dry bones
Ezekiel connected dem dry bones
Ezekiel connected dem dry bones
Now I hear the word of the Lord.

Well, your toe bone connected ot your foot bone
Your foot bone connected to your heel bone
Your heel bone connected to your ankle bone
Your ankle bone connected to your leg bone
Your leg bone connected to your knee bone
Your knee bone connected to your thigh bone
Your thigh bone connected to your hip bone
Your back bone connected to your shoulder bone
Your shoulder bone connected to your neck bone
Your neck bone connected to your head bone
I hear the word of the Lord!

A dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around
A dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around
A dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around
I hear the word of the Lord!

Disconnect dem bones, dem dry bones
Disconnect dem bones, dem dry bones
Disconnect dem bones, dem dry bones
An' I hear the word of the Lord!

Well, your head bone connected from your neck bone
Your neck bone connected from your shoulder bone
Your back bone connected from your back bone
Your hip bone connected from your thigh bone
Your thigh bone connected from your knee bone
Your knee bone connected from your ankle bone
Your ankle bone connected from your heel bone
Your heel bone connected from your foot bone
Your foot bone connected from your toe bone
An' I hear the word of the Lord! Oh well

A dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
A dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
A dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
An' I hear the word of the Lord! Mmmh

A dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
A dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
A dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
An' I hear the word of the Lord! Mmmh


Footnote


A final movement catches my attention.

I note it here for further reflection.

"What makes us drawn to music is that our whole being is music: our mind and body, the nature in which we live, the nature which has made us, all that is beneath and around us, it is all music."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Image credits.

Plate found on page 7 of Frankenstein Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley caption:

"FRANKENSTEIN AT WORK IN HIS LABORATORY."

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein,_pg_7.jpg

Netscape.

virgin territory, smooth space, untouched, wild, unexplored.

I have just been skimming Sian Bayne's article entitled Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces which Dave Cormier shared in the rhizo14 Facebook group.

For reasons beyond me, I am suddenly sitting here writing this.

This is perhaps a nomadic walkabout.

Why would I say such a thing?

I gathered together a few belongings and took flight. 

Where on earth is this heading?

I had better get a quote in here from (on?) Deleuze and Guattari:

"The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is ‘striated’, or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad 

space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). (Massumi, 1988, p. xiii)"

Quoted by Sian Bayne.

Phew, that's better, I have something to hang onto.  

I am already reaching out for words, for the words of others? to better express? what? myself?

I am not entirely sure. 

There is a sort of deliberate act here in my refusal at this moment to reread, to capture the structuring of Sian Bayne's thought.  That I am writing now is enough for me.

"We are the measure of all things." 

Protagoras

That is Protagoras, Wikipedia reliably (?) informs me, who said those words.

I am the measure of all things...

Yet, I am at a loss with out language, this is at a loss without Blogger, without wifi, without you. 

Yes, I am at a loss without you.

You are the measure of me.

You are the measure of the thing that is me.

You are the measure of the thing that is me here.

I am here now?

My point here, is dependent on my trajectory. 

My point here, is dependent on your trajectory.

My point here, is that I am not here without you.

"What is important about this conceptualisation of space is not so much the way the two types of space are opposed to each other as their tendency to pervade each other – for striation to appropriate the smooth, and for the smooth to emerge from the striated."

S.Bayne 

Yes, I am sewing together myself through this exploration, through these words, across this space, framed that it is.

I am supported in my human frame.

I am pointing my finger, I am indicating my presence, I am raising my voice, a cry in a wilderness.

What is this act?

How does it fit into a/the scheme of things?

I know not.

I am heading off into the unknown. 

Only looking back, only retracing my steps will my journey make sense.

I am writing narrative. I am a mapping story.

I return an instant to Sian Bayne's map.

I pick up a tracing of Deleuze and Guattari that she has made of a path across a thousand plateaux

"Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us." 

Deleuze and Guattari

No, as soon as I am confronted by this space, this void, I scratch my soul on a wall,  I yell my longing.

You are the measure of me.

I catch a flicker of recognition in an eye.

I am still here now.

I am saved.

I mean something now.

Yet that meaning will for ever be elusive.

I have left.

This is my point...

Look, we are beyond.

"to ‘navigate’ a space is, for Deleuze & Guattari, to begin the process of striation"

S. Bayne.

Contexualising space.

The lines etched on the surface...(French words come into my mind, I await)

The lines etched on the surface (French words come into my mind, I await).

The lines etched on the surface reveal a concentration of my attention on space.

When the white page is present, we ignore its significance.

We need context for the void.

What strikes me is how the dark lines here illuminate the light not the other way round.





Stuff. Thing. Breath. Touch. Smell. Feeling.

You.

The cursor which you can't see on this page is counting the seconds.

The time for these words to....

I hadn't really noticed it before. I knew it. I felt it. I loved it.

I just hadn't noticed it enough to write explicitly about the process that brings out
("my?" " no, not mine" "there is no ego left here." "ok you're right.... I am a child, a bit")

....patterns on a surface. 

It all started with Keith Hamon (him again) reminding me of time that I have spent making connections with space.

He is investigating prepositions.

I have a number of different processes of writing. 

Now this is more clearly myself taking this article of faith onwards.

There is a conscious decision, I am aware of now trying to express (I am even editing here) what happens when I let IT out.

IT is at times instant, at other times, distant, at other times non-existant.

I have been embodying IT by living IT. I feel that I should attempt to explain IT. 

("Good luck, mate!"  That is definitely me there, I recognise myself in these added commentaries!)

The click which made the connection came from Keith responding to elements in a previous post tagged Spacetimecontinuum... and disagreeing that "Words are poor vectors of communication." 

I was intrigued by his vociferous reaction.

All the more that on rereading what I had written, or should I say what had written ITself, I noticed written in bold "Words are poor vectors of connection". 

The trouble I am having now is to describe this process of loss of ego.

It has been making ITs presence clear in its incessant repetition of absence in these pages. Nevertheless I have never been really able to explain it, or indeed wanted to.

There are times when one jealously keeps one's secrets for fear that on naming them they will evaporate. The spell will be broken.

I am taking the risk...for you.

Then I clicked and IT clicked: "enso" a word that had never revealed its existence to me until now jumped to the fore.

an ensō (円相 , "circle"^?) is a circle that is hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create.

For me then "enso" expresses what happens when we connect, or IT connects and stuff is sparked. I have the strong impression that the lack of judgement present in a large connected course or at least the diversity of judgement present might enable diffuse circles of empathy.

Spaces of empathy, caring (community Dave Cormier?) enable us to be confronted by a whole series of FELT patterns and fragments of patterns which reflect not the ego or the individual but US (or THEM).

Our limits are constantly being redrawn. Who are we now?

Where are we now?
For reasons unknown David Bowie appears to illustrate what? Search and you will find?

As these patterns fire and connect, light shines through, making new kaleidoscopic patterns. Such patterns act like flowers attracting attention.

None of this can be attributed to an individual or a group of individuals because what contours the pattern is the networked interactions. A NETWORK, does it network?

We are drawing light by drawing on light.

What I am and what I am not.
What we are and what we are not.
To be or not to be.

I (one) and 0 (zero) O (all).
Are here.

Now.

Where was that reference? I look back. IT wants to appear.

There we are, TIME. How do we express it? When we have so little else?

He goes back to the browsing history.

Wind is what I remember. Yes the story of the flag.

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: `The flag is moving.'The other said: `The wind is moving.'
The sixth patriach happened to be passing by. He told them: `Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.'

No idea how that will connect now.  We will see.

We are the wind, we are not a flag.

Wind, is that all there is?
What blows us?

Notes to self.

"Blimey (deep breath) what the hell does that mean?"

"Shit, now we are tumbleweed. Not much of a write up."


P.S.

Sorry.

Beyond me.

So many words. So many stories.

A benign presence behind me. A wall, unlistening, unyielding, uncaring, but solidly present. Over 15 years, I came to realise that the moments when I had nothing to say, when I was still, were the moments of truth.

Nothing to say, nothing to prove, nothing to fear.

The silence was around me. The wall, was no more than a choice. I moved my eyes to a horizon.

I took a step, I was gone. These words are beyond me, they belong to the wall, this page, the moment.

When, I am present, I wait for my distraction to leave, to be absent, to make this present, for you. 

These words are not mine, they are not yours, they come from beyond a wall. 

Who cares to follow these lines, does so at his own pace, at his own risk.

The owner of this page takes no responsibility for any (be)longings which should go missing...

A wall punctuates your silence.

Be still.