Warranty for the life of humans

Sometimes, I feel absorbed in HereNow. This is a perception, and the perception is HereNow, and most of that is whatever is touching the senses of the human system. But the human system itself vanishes into a blind spot at the center of HereNow. When I look back at that system from my perch at the tropopause, it feels bafflingly tiny and laughably insignificant; like a swirl of scum flung off a wavelet on the ocean of Being. I feel a gulf of unknowingness between the vastly empty weight of Being and the deeply flimsy transience of what the human system identifies as, whether intentionality, body, choice, mind, or desire and so on. It seems unimaginable that humans can continue existing in that vacuum, under that weight; and impossible to understand why we haven’t exploded, or been crushed, respectively; or in the same happening.

Of course, there’s an ‘and yet’, and it goes like this: some of the things humans do are very awesome and feel very nice; quite as if their doing transcends their existential triviality. The ripples from the new patterns they somehow manage to cause to appear in the scum on the waves on the ocean of Being somehow manage to influence other patterns, sometimes they unstick (dukkha -> sukkha) a little bit of fluff that miraculously kept itself stuck in a pattern that felt unhappy or constrained, they cause a pattern of desire to become a pattern of satisfaction, they encourage new and exciting patterns of desire to emerge and so on. Be they doings of art or love, science or politics, I wouldn’t want to miss them, even if right now I can’t see how they can exist. And the damnedest thing of course is that they feel as if they cause the scum to feel more alive, they cause the transient chaos of living as humans to feel more grounded and open, they make the human pattern feel part of the ocean for a few moments, and in those moments trivial existence feels like it is essential being. I may be blinded by hope when I say this, but it feels like it makes the ocean capable of harbouring new patterns, new forms, new beings; and that feels decidedly non-trivial; also fun, healthy and good. Maybe the ocean doesn’t ultimately care (or maybe it does, who can tell, and it sure wouldn’t matter if someone can), but why not have fun healthy good things happening, even if the illusion of choice is just that.

So now my simple brain wants to know where this overly convoluted heap of waffling is leading and decides  to use it to have another crack at the hoary old dilemmas surrounding the (again, illusionary) questions of what ’should’ ‘I’ ‘do’ and why. (By now I hope you get why I call those questions illusionary, right? Otherwise that’s what the comments are for. Hey didja know there’s a comment section? You can comment there. It’s fun! Healthy! Good! Do eet. Do eet noowwwww.) Alright, so there’s an unimaginable rift between what I’m in the habit of calling me and Being, but still, now what. Especially considering the fact that Being could crush me like less than a bug and nothing would be lost, nothing would change. Maybe we are after all ‘justified’ (rhetorically speaking) in assuming we have latitude to choose, hope, build, desire – Being hasn’t snuffed us out yet, so why not. We’ll have to assume that that’s as much of a warranty for the possibility of human life as we’re going to get, and right now, maybe that’s enough. Although looking at the world and what it suffers: barely; and we keep trying to cut it closer. So roll on the revolution. As long as I can dance, I’ll do my part. Looking forward to see yours, too.

The difference between house and techno

So I’m sitting here listening to Gorje Hewek’s Vous Lhiem, and suddenly it strikes me, around 48:36: none of the layers here would be out of place in house music, just like their groovy interplay would be right at home, so why does this still feel like techno to me? There’s layers, loops and grooves in house and in techno, what is it that makes me want to call something housey or technoy.

Well, it could be something like this: techno uses stuff to make loops and layer them, and a lot of nice techno uses grooves for that. House uses loops to groove, and layers them if it enhances the groove. [Shorter: techno loops grooves, and house grooves loops.]

Apart from that (which is nothing like an ironclad law) anything’s possible of course, and it all depends on taste and influence and mood and expression and suchlike. The stuff that the techno guys loop is often artificial or concrete or abstract and not explicitly groovy, but it becomes groovy because the layering of the loops is hypnotic and that’s a very deep groove. The loops that the house guys groove are more often organic or come from a simpler artificiality that tried (and failed, gloriously) to mimic organic sounds: venerable 303’s belching clouds of acid vapour while attempting to sound like two hands, clapping. Also therefore techno depends on hypnotic layering, which determines the structure of the tracks: there’s no room to dig in to lyrics, choruses and so on within that framework, so instead it just keeps looping and shifting, minimally, to stay in a zone that’s fit for enjoyment by humans. The structure of house stays a bit closer to already developed forms of call and response, verse and refrain and all that, which have proven themselves to groove throughout the ages.

But always this: either you work towards layered looping (with groove as a very welcome side dish), and thence into hypnosis/trance; or you go towards groove (with some smart loopy layers to smarten stuff up) and from there into the sexytime.

And now that I’ve said that of course I don’t give a cock what you call it (housetechnobreakstrancegospeljazzecstasy), but it still feels to me as if those two are different directions, and it might be possible from there to feel into some potential palettes of expression and movement and energy, which would be fun. Worked for Kurt Koegel, and worked for me when he taught me about them (those palettes of somatic movement in contact improv he put together are awesome and freeing and comfortable and very very nice).

Breath center

I think I mentioned before that toe-breath is unbalancing (and the fact that it’s too much of a bother to look up and link to the post in question shows that blog management really isn’t as loser-friendly as all that yet), and although I’d still consider it a useful emergency move, the feeling that what it it does is pull me off-center is growing, and that’s never a good idea.
So I’ve been playing around with radially centered breath for a bit. I’m not interested in finding out if I’m working with hara, navel, dan-t’ien, Almaas’s empty cube (is that called moon spot, or is that something else again? note to self call Raymond), or the spot midway between sacrum and pubic bone; it’s somewhere in there, though I feel that (for now at least) I’m working with something that tends to be a bit higher and more to the front of the body than I feel is comfortable and sustainable and uh, right.
There’s a breath that goes radially into this spot, from crown and perineum, fingers and toes into this center, and outwards again. It was interesting to follow this movement of breath-like energy, and notice that there’s a different flavor of energy that can easily move synchronously but also antichronously (is that a word? when breath inhales this reaches out, when it exhales it pools together; you know what I mean). And a third layer, which was more one of intent or desire: it’s possible to find a spot in the breath cycle, or in that second layer (which I might call something like a libidinous cycle) where I feel most at home or most able to feel pleasure in exerting myself.
And at least a fourth layer, one cycling between where witnessing rests most easily and mindfully, and where it feels impossible to even stay awake.
It provided me minutes, nay seconds of fun just trying to keep track of all this stuff polyrhythmically, and I think it could be kind of revealing or maybe just a fun getting to know you exercise to play around with this and figure out where you like to be, and where you aren’t, and maybe why.
Oh by the way toe-breath (does calling it that disgust you? You’re probably from the Usa) is a move the vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden would call a paardenmiddel. It would advise you not to use this particular paardenmiddel, though it would applaud your use of the word. Damn it, that worked better when I wrote it all in Dutch. If being dumb (in a vaguely funny way) and deeply incomprehensible can be called better than being obtuse and completely incomprehensible.

Men and Women: Are they more Different than Alike?

Talking with (which means listening to, a lot of the time) ms. neighbour is adding a lot of flavour to my perception of gender and concepts of genderedness.
A different perspective is opening up when I take account of the possibility that in a lot of the different sectors of being (somatic, mental, sexual, spiritual etc.), humans might have pretty much equally big and full potential to live as a woman or as a man. The presupposition I appear to have accepted ’til now is that people inherently ‘center on some point of a 1-dimensional scale of gender’, which I often thought to be unconsciously (genetically, environmentally, socially) determined; and that just isn’t very compelling at all anymore – it still feels pretty ingrained though. E.g. (now when I think it out loud it’s kinda obvious) you can live somatically as a woman even though corporeally you’re a man. You essentially don’t have to do anything to prove worthy of this label, as long as your somatic being isn’t being a man, and it’s just an intellectual desire for you to have it be called feminine, in which case you’re just playing word games. This is possible because that’s how big genders are.
Now, I still suppose that it’s possible to call things womanly or manly, but one of the benefits of this perspective is that it seems impossible to me to judge a majority of the stuff we think about when we think about gender on the aforementioned linear scale, because this is quite emphatically not a linear scale anymore, femininity and masculinity are much more like two potentially completely interpenetrating clouds of sense and meaning and desire and good stuff, really.

Something you don’t like.

Right now, there’s something you don’t like. There are also other nows, and in some of them that something is absent. If you want to experience them, rejecting or denying or feeling patronizing about whatever it is that’s bothering you is the best way to lower your chances of that ever happening.

Oh about that horror…

That turned out to be about Kali. Ms. Neighbour introduced me to her, and she (Kali, not the bobbly one, well maybe her too but in a much nicer way I’d hope) wants to bite my head off, but then I get to bite off hers, so that’s alright. I don’t know if she’s round the bend enough to not even mind anymore if I’d call her a nice lady, so I’ll refrain. Of course, that’s not really an insightful way to refer to her either.

dude where’s that, my, thing you know? right! car.

That movie is so gay. Also that one highly quotable line ’scrü the ünivørs’ should be a subtitle of this blog one time, once people start to actually care about such things, maybe. Okay I’ll have to care about them myself then.

New policy: dump any draft.

Yes it’s true, I can draft however much I want but it’s been shown that I will not edit drafts into audience-friendly form on my own. Maybe later, or when I get enough complaints (hellooooho?). So here goes! Relax, read, enjoy, wonder WTF I’m on about this time, shoot me an email or a comment and I’ll feel invited to elucidate.

In some strains of neo-advaitic theory absolutism and/or nihilism is way too prevalent to feel healthy anymore. Particularly useless if making use of enlightenment for healing is attempted. Looking at you Byron Katie. (Isaac Shapiro I’m holding out hope for, smart dude that.) Also a so called enlightened world view that forgets who it is that spends all this time doing all this stuff that it (the view i.e.) busily keeps declaring illusionary or irrelevant is sort of cutely dumb.

But I seem to be getting on the scent of a fullness-transcendence that is an alternative to the emptiness thingy that advaitics teach. (-> explain fullness …)

Maybe a third kind, something to do with how awareness and body/fullness are the same – sounds blindingly obvious, but it’s hard to re manifest the feeling – it’s the androgynous third to the male emptiness / female fullness thing, sort of a purer creativity that doesn’t need the coming together of male and female to create.

How ‘you’ can do something to ‘get’ differently enlightened – if retraining your system isn’t doing something we need to talk about the definition of doing. Simply getting your system to stop perpetuating production as a means of evading the Being Here Now is an excellent activity, and if you tell me I can’t do that you’re probably confused who you’re talking to.

Somabile: carried by the body, as all this bullshit is after all, how could that hang together let allone carry itself by itself?

New subtitle from:… jjgo.

I’d be way more willing to offer myself (??? maybe make me active and the guru the sacrificer? to be edited) to a guru if I felt he had a feeling of humility and was willing to get close to me and give me stuff. (This means that I’d still be very unwilling to do that, it’s just that it seems like such a surreally dumb thing to do to me now.)

vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden: kukelen.

I don’t know if dykes are more likely to be attracted to the side of me that I would most like to be attractive for, and I don’t know how much ms. neighbour identifies with her bisexual tendencies, but I’ll tell you that if she came and told me, to my face, that she’d like to maybe chow down on some pretty rug again sometime soon, I’d totally egg her on. (did you notice how I said ‘egg’? Yeah okay more witty than funny.)

Include sound clips, e.g. Jordan with the subtitle, there was something in the latest savage lurvecast, and that one percussion line in Votono was really cute. Would probably make the blog a lot more engaging.

Why I like to preach – how it could even be a valid urge.

The horror, and what might be fun about it.

For some vague reason* I’m beginning to feel interested in artistic expressions of grinding defeat and annihilation, like darkpsy, books like Gravity’s Rainbow, and of course: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks, which deserves its own post (later yeah right later). The inescapability of that mood used to feel very scary to me, but I’m starting to see a glimpse of release or devotion or, what’s Hingabe in English? in it too, now. (Could be all that hot sex I’ve been having over the last 36 hours.)

Inescapable doom could serve as an image of the hopelessness Chögyam Trungpa was talking about, for instance – the empty illusion of conscious intent. Or the horrific aspect of Warren Ellis’ work and blog, which is a great way to convince yourself that yes, all those nice things you see around you are just as transient as anything. They’ll rot and decay on their own time anyway, and it’s super easy to have your nice bits shattered, liquefied, maimed, or chewed off by aliens from Outside (where the Others come from). And of course there’s a heroism in accepting that certainty to such an extent that you take this othering influence into your own life and let it act out on your own body, so cross posts from Modblog never lose their relevance (not that I’m going to click through though).

Now for the theoretical part:

• emptiness and fullness
• samsara: emptiness doesn’t exist
• nirvana: fullness doesn’t exist
• tantra: emptiness == fullness ( == svabhavikakaya? some not very clear other kind of thing?)

*(cute, how each next word is one letter longer there)

Zoom in2 birdspace.

/& am a hooj wild bird floatin on thi currents slidin wifin thi driftin wind, hangin lazily loosed on ma outstretchd wings cantileverd acros thi singin air. Ma wingtip fevirs r eech thi size of hands; they flutir like a lam’s hart flutirs when ma shado folz ovir it. Ma feet r steel-tipt grapples hung on thi end ov ma hawser legs. Ma talins r unsheethd razers; onli ma Is r sharper. Ma beek is harder than bone, keener than juss-broke glass. Ma keel bone is a grate nife cozend in ma flesh & cleevin thi soft air; ma ribs r glistnin springs, ma mussils sleek bunchd fists ov oily powr, ma hart a chambr fild wif slo thunder, qwiet & unstressd; a towrin dam triklin powr, tikin ovir, hedwaters ov charjed blud pent & latent.

Wel, YES! This is moar like it! Why did I evir bothir been a hok? Why woz I so bleedin unambishis? I feel feers, I feel powerfil.

[© Iain M. Banks, Feersum Endjinn]

(See what I mean? Terrifically quotable.)