Category Archives: Works

Coaxing bolts from the blue

Design, Shit theory

The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better.

The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of absence”. They mistake inconceivability as dead nonexistence. If such an inhospitable person points their eyeballs or minds at something, and nothing is perceived or conceived, to them it is pointless to engage. They cut it off, implicitly or explicitly, through a variety of tactics (* see note below), painfully familiar to anyone with a living designerly soul. They are invalidation tactics, meant to not only assert but demonstrate and enact impossibility, and to convince everyone involved that the incipient idea is not worth further consideration. In this way, they sap the enthusiasm, energy and hope required to invite the future into the present.

The best design collaborators, though, are vividly alive to the omnipresent possibility that something miraculous might irrupt into the world at any moment.

They adopt an attitude and receptive charge of imminent miracle. Kate Bush sung it well:

I just know that something good is gonna happen
I don’t know when…
But just saying it could even make it happen

Do not mistake this outburst for an optimistic prediction. These sung words are a speech act, that expresses, describes and invokes the conditions for coaxing the unconceived from nowhere into presence, ex nihilo. What is invoked is an acutely charged expectation that something shockingly new and good might shock us with its spontaneous appearance.

But the expectation is only a necessary condition. It is not in itself sufficient. The irruption ex nihilo emerges from efforts to summon it forth. Ideas are invited to consummation through participation in its development, emergence, strengthening and maturation.

But… If we deny this expectation, and refuse to cooperate and participate in its emergence, the idea’s worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The idea goes nowhere because we refuse to come along.

This awareness and attitude toward nothingness is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Another insight into nothingness is crucial: the sober understanding that these miracles are cloaked with dread, and with this understanding a second attitude: courageous resolve to endure the dread, and press forward through the agony.

A delightful process will not yield delightful results. It will yield only frivolous and derivative drivel. It is the harrowing processes that produce brilliant breakthroughs of insight.

I once got into a surprisingly bitter fight over this matter. I had a philosophical friend who insisted that my tragic sense of creativity was passé. Maybe in his youth he had too much vulgar existentialism, with all its angsty melodrama and alienated brooding.

His claim — his doctrine, actually — was that we can generate novelty without any pain. We could frolic about in the world of ideas, and through pure play produce exciting new ideas with joyous profusion. His view was that it was much more blazingly and boldly original to reject the necessity of creative pain than to embrace it.

This pissed me off. Maybe it was because this vision of frivolous creativity reminds me of how nondesigners think design probably is or should be.

But annoyance became hostility, when I began to notice that whenever I tried to share with him one of my painfully won insights, he didn’t understand them. And he would sit and smirk, as my attempts to convey my insights failed to penetrate his skull. His own incomprehension and my frustration were amusing evidence that there was no point to my babble.

But then — eureka! My confusion had given him a new novel idea! Perhaps he would write it into the book he was writing.

And see? No angst. No suffering. Just floating playfully above, amused, detached, waiting for inspiration to alight.

And he would then proceed to paraphrase my own idea to me as his own, as if he himself conceived what he refused to be taught.

No wonder he believed that frolicking about in the playground of other people’s ideas was sufficient to stimulate original thought.

He couldn’t conceive the difference between kidnapping someone else’s insight and birthing his own.

Rejection of the radically unfamiliar, passive consumption of novelty won through distant ugly work — two facets of the same attitude toward approaching nothingness. Two strategies for avoiding the labor pain, strain, uncertainty and terror of giving birth to new being ex nihilo.

Note * — One common way to destroy possibility of radical newness is to interrupt. This kills the line of intuitive thought before it can gains flow, momentum, musicality. Chop the song into isolated notes, and interject each with soul-killing frustration, and the melody will stay dismembered and never come to life.

Or digress. Change the subject (“subject” in the most literal, egregoric sense). Or impose and reimpose an alien field of relevance upon the conversation. “What you are trying to say is irrelevant, and should therefore be snuffed out before it wastes more time.”

Or confront the fragile embryonic subject with some overpowering objection, and turn the nursery into an arena, where the infant must prove its right to eventual maturity by defeating gladiators and lions. Even if the infant survives the arena, the very deprivation of nurture and protection will turn the idea monstrous and ugly.

Pessimistically pick at the idea, and find innumerable reasons why it the idea can never come to anything. Destroy the ideas faith in itself until it is dispirited and ready to give up the geist.

In fearful organizations, another routine tactic is lethally effective. For the sake of efficiency or rigor, clap procedures, formalities and norms onto the collaboration. These misnorms afford credibility only to well-established, pre-comprehended ideas, Only sturdy, old, established, workaday idea-blocks are admitted, and the only innovation permitted is in permutations of stacking. One can build whatever out of the provided LEGO block set, but nothing on the order of inventing LEGO blocks could ever happen. However novel the stacking, the notion stacks never feel promising, only stalely sufficient. But it serves its true purpose, which is to check boxes that require checking, and make one’s colleagues more likely layoff targets than oneself. The output lacks all excitement, but never mind that. A marketing department will coat the quotidian with noncredible hype calculated to be adequate for making a fraction of a percent of a segment choose this option of that one. The experience of this bullshit coated chickenshit, is commonly known as “corporate”. It is the natural consequence of trying to add “desirability” at the end of an engineering process (often social engineering that mistakes itself for design because it considers “people”) that should have been designed starting from desirability.

It is commonplace — and by commonplace logic, it is the precisely the commonplace that determines all meaning — to call all vision-oriented planning design.

To design is to imagine a possibility with such specificity that specifications are produced that can serve as a plan. (“Design is the rendering of intent”, to use the poetically spare jargon of one typical design “thought leader”.) According to this definition of design, one designs a book or a service in the same sense as one designs a microchip or jet engine.

But we know, even when we can’t or won’t admit it, that design has a second, deeper meaning. And it is this meaning that gives design its mystique, and that is because design (in this second sense) it is rooted in the same soil as mysticism. Design in this sense taps into depths of human meaning, draws it to the surface and nourishes the world with strange new vivacity. There is something vividly alive, important and ineffable in a great design artifact — unprecedented, artificial (in the strict sense) but as natural as nature itself — enhanced, renewed, human.

If Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial” explored “rendering of intent” design, someone should write a followup: “Arts of the Second-Natural” to explore design that materially manifests meaning. The blurring of these two conceptions of design has made it far too effortless to lose the second, far more vulnerable design that serves an technocratic order that numbs and is numb to love, even of the minutest magnitude.

Designerly nothingness

Design, Exnihilism

Complaint litany of an alienated designer:

This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.

This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.

This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.

Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.

Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.

Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.

In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”

At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”

This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens

Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.

But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.

Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.

Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.

But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*

And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).

Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”

The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.

Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.

They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?

No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.

In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.

It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.

Fertile overlap

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.

Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.

Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.

Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.

The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.

Material, medium and goal

Enworldment, Philosophy

Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.

Punchline

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

All pranking aside, the “Bubbler” faith is my own faith. The inconceivable-from-here being is Atzilut, but Beriah scrubs the eternity spotless every nanosecond of every day with a cloaking coat of nihilude, leaving us collectively, personally, and intuitively finite, both in the underheaven of Yetzirah and down here in the actual, factual earthiness of Assiyah.

Scholem on originality and tradition

Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics

A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:

“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.

Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.

But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.

Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.

There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.

Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.

The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.

It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.

Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.

It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.

Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)

To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.

This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.

Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.

And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.

Choose your nothingness

Exnihilism

Choose your nothingness: pregnant nihilitude or dead nihilism. Halo or hood is the choice we face.

No belief is good or bad. No truth can badge swipe you into heaven.

The content of belief or disbelief has no intrinsic moral value.

Belief content does, however have moral significance, because belief signifies the faith by which (by whom) a belief is believed.

To put it in Scholem’s words, belief content has “spiritual physiognomy”. Behind the facial contours of beliefs is a faith who does the believing — who intuits, feels and responds not only to truth, but to realities who challenge truth.

Faith is not only moral or immoral — it is morality per se, per esse.

What you believe is amoral. How you believe has moral valence. Why you believe is morality itself. Why animates How; How shapes What. What reflects How by the moving light of Why.

What you believe is an ambiguous symptom (again, a physiognomy) of Why and How, from which — from Whom — belief content grows and lives and bears practical fruit.

To say it more plainly:

One chooses a holy and eternally pregnant nothingness from which creation and revelation irrupt ex nihilo.

Or one chooses a blankly nonexistent nothingness into which all things come to naught.

Depending on which nothingness you choose you will live in exnihilism, or undie in nihilism.

One’s everything follows from one’s choice of nothingness.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Where was I?

Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.

(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)

Trilingual

Autobiography, Design, Shit theory

Back in the day, I had a business with my dear friend Vanessa.

Vanessa and I are both profoundly and intensely Gen X, and sometimes (~90%) we communicated with one another in the native language of our generation. If our client happened to be Gen X, and was sufficiently unshitty, sometimes we would speak to them that way, too.

Our little business was as bilingual as Canada. We were prepared to express every one of our key ideas bilingually. We spoke in Business Casual to uptight people, and in Pottymouth to cool people. If you made us nervous, we’d give you an FAQ on the importance of design research. If we trusted you, you got an FUQ that enumerated the horrible things that befall omniscient dumbasses who leave Frequently Unasked Questions unasked. If you asked us what we did and you seemed like an asshole we said usability and innovation. “You know, ” we’d say, with sphincters well-clenched, “Making the right thing, or making the thing right. Ha. Ha. Ha.” But if we liked the cut of your jib, we explained that we’re always either “fixing some seriously fucked up shit” or “fixing to seriously fuck some shit up.”

I mention this now because I just wrote a post in a third language, which is my first language, Flakiness. That language is infinitely less socially acceptable than either Business Casual or Pottymouth. This is a crying shame because Flakiness is the only language that does any justice at all to design. Flakiness is the language I use when I am speaking to myself about things that matter most to me.

If my last little post on hermetic design left you cold, confused or irritable, maybe try this Pottymouth post on bullshit and chickenshit, which says more or less exactly the same thing.

Exnihilist maxim

Exnihilism, Letterpress

We look for meaning, and all we see is nothing. But this is exactly what meaning always looks like the instant before it irrupts out of nowhere ex nihilo, flooding the world with divine importance.

“But this time is different!”

Of course it is.

This time is always different, and in this respect, it is always the same.

If I ever get this maxim into a form that can penetrate real existential despair, and at least pry it open, if not dispel it, I will letterpress a zillion copies and leave them everywhere.

Alive to craft

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Religion

Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.

We do precious little craft.

In fact, we do not even know what craft means.

We are dead to craft.

Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.

We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.

We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.

We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.

Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:

When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.

…

Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.

What is it to be alive to craft?

How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?

We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.

My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.

An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.

In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.

Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.

Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.

Meditation on meditation

Autobiography, Esoterism, Exnihilism

We sit in meditation awaiting spectacular apotheotic experiences. This distracts us from receiving the incessant gift, offered, re-offered, again and again: the insight of distraction. Who, exactly, decided to seek spiritual orgasms, flashing divine lights, the face of God? Who, exactly, decided to depart the seated now to revel in magical ambitions or to struggle with past sufferings? And who, exactly, summons us back to now, to feel the faint tickle of breath on nostril and lip, the aching or vibrating body? Nobody did. Nobody does. It is the same nobody who flees the here and now and sees me from a nonexistent elsewhere, most minutes of most days, between birth and death.

Gestellen

Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A gestalt shift in a given object results from a gestell shift in receiving subject.

A shift in experienced wholes (perceived or conceived) results from enceptive structures. The enceptive structures are elaborately inter-nested containers for experiential content. Enceptions cannot be comprehended because it is by them that comprehension knows. We know this tree solely by its fruit — the container by its content. …Kingdoms/Malkut, palaces/hekhalot, rooms, wineskins…

Our lungs are an everted tree. By the lung’s capaciousness, we breathe air.

Ruach is an everted tree. By Ruach’s tzimtzum, Neshamah breathes inspiration.

As every subject is an everted objectivity, a gestell is an everted field of possible gestalts.

A Heideggerian will hate this use of gestell. I will counter that technicity is only one possible gestell, and that another gestell is possible and necessary. In fact, to [mis]quote Heidegger himself, “only [this] can save us.”

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.

It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.

I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)

I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.

My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.

When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.

All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.

I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.

For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.

In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.

Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.

There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.

I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.

I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.

I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.