#beyond the conditions of one's existence being “fake�� through our actions and relationships with others‚ ourselves and the world‚

[jacksintention]

I'm thinking again on the fact that so often comments, criticism and readings on Jack dwell a lot on how he is barely human/a person/doesn't have a personality at the point of the story and, while I somewhat understand these points, I find them so lacking. I find them... ableist? I'm always doubtful to use the word here because I'm not sure if it's applied in this kind (mental health) of context, but something like that. And I find them extremely simplistic.

However, honestly, a big part of the reason for these readings being so popular is that the manga itself words it that way. But that's one of the problems I find in the manga. When I say P.andora Hear.ts is very good but unfortunately it is very manga-like at times, besides the 2000s homojokes and the like, I'm usually thinking about things like this. I feel like often characters and situations that are (potentially) very intricate instead of getting insightful deep overviews often get screwed by the writing itself, which falls into very manga tropes a lot in a bad way (not that every manga has to fall into them, or that every manga trope has to be bad or written badly).

I don't know... For instance, I'd argue R.askolnikov's capacity for love in Cr.ime and Punishmen.t is debatable, but it's never treated as if it made him less of a person, a human being or made him not have a personality. I'd say not even Svidrigailo.v, who is as much a Bad Guy™ as a character can be, gets that treatment by the writing. I'd say that even him or Mikol.ka are written as fully fleshed human beings with their intricate internal lives and feelings. Svidrig.ailov's last scene with D.unya is fascinating for both characters and spins the whole dynamic and makes you question the entire narrative and veracity of not only those two characters, but brings to mind several other conversations among different characters and throws light (and doubt!) on the main plot between R.askolnikov and Porf.iry.

In similar situations, Jack's humanity, personhood and personality are debated, doubted and even full on accepted as vanished. No one reads Crim.e and Punishmen.t and comes to the same conclusions about Raskolni.kov, Svidrig.ailov, Sony.a or Razu.mikhin. The writing doesn't allow it. The writing doesn't allow you to forget that humanity is diverse and multifaceted, that it can be sad and cruel and loving and monstrous, even all at the same time, or that a person may struggle with feeling at all; and one is still a person.

[animeeveningnews]

Homely Guy Does Nothing Wrong, Is Blamed For Everything

MISTILTEINN, PLANTATION 13--- Following a “Partner Shuffle” exercise in which his original Franxx partner Kokoro (AKA Code: 556) swapped partners to pair up with fellow pilot Mitsuru, AKA (Code: 326.) Local homely guy Futoshi (AKA Code: 214) has recently been the target of blame for everything. “The fact that he exists in the first place was his first crime.” Said Amelia R. Smith, echoing the views of avid supporters of the burgeoning relationship between Franxx pilots Mitsuru and Kokoro. Other sources, on the other hand offered alternate reasons to loathe the least visually appealing of the group of emotional novices. 

“His love for Kokoro is shallow,” Said one anonymous source, hinting that after several episodes and in-universe months of positive background interaction, motivation and consideration for his partner, Futoshi was likely not interested in her as a person at all. “-He didn’t even try to understand her!” 

Another source states: “He’s putting her on a pedestal!” In response to the revelation that Kokoro doesn’t believe she’s as good as Futoshi (the straightforward and optimistic boy she’s been closest to, hand-fed breakfast to, fought alongside in several battles with, supported each other with, and generally acted sweet and kind to each other with often enough for their teammates to comment on) seems to make her out to be. 

 “-No matter how I look at it, he must be making it hard to be herself!” The source concludes, accepting that Kokoro’s self evaluation was in no way a sign of personal issues and false feelings of inadequacy and self depreciation that many people her age go through, as well as inadvertently suggesting that Kokoro’s kind and considerate actions towards him was thus, all fake, rather than proof that in the end, whether or not she felt right with him, she’s still a decent and kind person and might instead, be selling herself short.

“He’s a #NiceGuy,” Said our final source, comparing the naiive and sincere teenage fighter robot pilot who’s life involved zero social experience outside laboratory conditions and somehow while hurt by the partner switch was able to accept it, wish them well, protect them mid battle. and instead of blaming the girl, only got angry when her new partner either dismissed their feelings, or nearly drove her to a self destructive act, because he genuinely cares about her,

-to hypocritical and sometimes misogynistic men from the real world who’s main, if not only reason to be nice to women is the promise of sexual favors, and are likely to disrespect or hate any woman who doesn’t respond to their efforts to be nice with said favors. “He’s a bad choice because he’s always obsessing over her and expecting something in return! He’ll probably get himself or others killed later on after being betrayed like this!” Concludes the source. 

Futoshi himself was not available to respond to these allegations, though data from his last battle suggests he’s stable enough to continue to pilot franxx with a skill and efficiency far beyond his sync rating, as well as protect his fellows during moments of weakness. Lastly his friends, Pilots Hiro, Mitsuru and Goro, all of whom had been so fixated on one person they adored, that their attempts to force a connection, come hell or high water, get back at perceived betrayal, and/or come to terms with not having the partnership they so desired, sometimes holding a grudge for years, has resulted in all of them, as well as their partners nearly getting killed at some point, were also unavailable for comment.

[201909617caic2021]

The Art of the Steel: The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump in the Rust Belt

To speak of Detroit is to speak of a fall from grace. The Motor City, once the heart of the American car industry, is now a punchline, a place to leave, a problem to solve. Detroit is both the literal and metaphorical centre of the Rust Belt, the North-eastern United States around the Great Lakes and Appalachian Mountains, the part of America that the rest has grown beyond. America will always need the Democratic money-making cities of the East and West Coasts and the Republican farms and oilfields of the South and Midwest. It doesn’t need Detroit cars, or Pittsburgh steel, or Akron tyres. Left behind by Washington, the forgotten factories of the Rust Belt were the ones to shock the world in 2016 with Donald Trump’s election, and oversee his downfall four years later.

The North East was once the jewel in the crown of American Industry. As the country ran out of Western Frontier, it needed steel, coal, and the other industries for an industrialising nation, as well as the means to transport them. With the Erie Canal completed and a great mass of railways built in the North East, as well as a growing supply of European immigrants willing to work for low wages, the factories of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Western New York boomed. But in the post war years, as families left for the suburbs (Detroit’s population dropped by one million between 1950 and 2019) and manufacturing left for cheaper countries (China’s population boom left many people willing to work for pennies on the dollar), no one knew what to with the forgotten factories. If the 50s, 60s, and 70s were America looking outward globally and abandoning its heartland, the 80s and Reaganomics did little to solve it. Finally, in 1984, Walter Mondale coined a term for what America had seen but not been able to quantify; “Reagan’s policies are turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl.” While it’s been tweaked in the years since, he linked the legacy of the ground itself being used and abused to the point of ruin by 1930s America to the descendants of those who made the country great being cast aside for cheaper manufacturing abroad and an increasingly services based economy. Mondale saw the region needed someone to represent its past and future in the White House, and while it wasn’t him (his 13 electoral votes are the fewest for a major candidate in the 50 State Era), the seeds were there for the upset 32 years later.

Within the framework of America’s outdated/working-as-intended (depending on who you ask) system, there are States worth campaigning in, and States that aren’t. And while the Rust Belt isn’t homogenous in its polling (good luck to any Republican that tries to campaign in Buffalo or southern Illinois in the hope of flipping those 55 votes), it placed increased pressure on getting those razor thin margins in States like Ohio, Florida and Michigan to land on your side. Looking at a county by county map of voting change, the largest shifts occurred in the Northeast, particularly Ohio, which was enough to earn him the Oval Office for the past four years.

But why was the man who had bankrupted so many businesses the one to save these ones? Well first we have to wonder how of it much Hillary Clinton was losing the 2016 election compared to Donald Trump winning it. Four years is plenty of time to write and rewrite history as to what exactly caused the 2016 ballot. Clinton has her own opinions on what happened, so many in fact she wrote a book full on them. In ‘What Happened’, the Secretary of State points to attacks from the Left (Bernie Sanders and Green Party candidate Jill Stein), attacks from the right (Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and FBI Director James Comey), attacks from abroad (the Russian influence and Wikileaks emails), but also her own mistakes and misgivings.

“Basket of Deplorables”. With context, a rejection of Trump’s close relationship with white supremist and other ‘alt-right’ factions. Without, a rallying cry for those left behind by Obama and Clinton, words those just trying to get by knew these career politicians called them behind their back, but now were so bold as to say it in public, feeling assured that the votes were already cast. A visit to Mingo County, West Virginia’s “Ground Zero for the coal crisis”, and being unable at the time to understand the level of anger felt there, shows a level of soul searching from Clinton that future Democrats would do well to heed.

Clinton was the continuation candidate. Voting for her was voting for four more years of Obama’s legacy. And let’s not forget that nationwide, more people did. But in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, people didn’t want continuation. They wanted the one who was promising them the world.

‘Make America Great Again’. A slogan tailor made for forgotten America, the one that had crushed the Nazis and outpaced the Soviets, but had been sold out by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades, bowing down to those with big chequebooks, whether they were in Silicon Valley, Beijing, or Mexico. An early split with Mitt Romney proved that Trump wasn’t the Republican candidate of the last 20 years. And he said it how it was! So much has been made of Trump’s style over the last five years, but do you remember what it was like when we first heard about a candidate calling George Bush’s brother ‘low energy’ to his face? Here he was, saying what so many Americans had thought about the last three Republican candidates, that they were too imbedded in the Washington system to see what life was really like for Americans, even if it came from the man with his name in gold on skyscrapers.

The controversial Paris Accords presented another sore point that Clinton had no salve for. Maybe miners didn’t necessarily agree that climate change was invented by the Chinese, but the sentiment was there: America was having to give up its centuries old coal mining industry for ‘clean’ power, while China and the rest of the world was doing nothing of the sort. Obama, Clinton, and all those other world leaders that signed the Paris Accords didn’t care about the generations spent underground in the Appalachian Mountains so that America could become so strong, but Trump did.

On 24th February 2016, Carrier Air Conditioning announced it would move its factory from Indianapolis to Mexico. Trump, still a Republican Primary candidate at the time, used the move as a central argument against free global trade, threatening to slap on a 35% tariff on anything they tried to bring back across the border to sell. Once elected, Trump managed to keep the factory in Indiana. It came at the cost of tax concessions and a sizable proportion of the jobs still going South, but Trump had proved his point. He wasn’t making empty promises, he would sit down at the negotiating table and use those years of business acumen to hash out a deal that put Americans first.

So how did the goodwill Trump earned in 2016 dissipate over the next four years?

March 2017, barely two months into his first term, Trump attempted to complete a campaign promise of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare and with something better. This superior option was kept incredibly vague throughout the campaign, but Obamacare had nationwide dislike attached to the name, through Republican efforts to paint it as simultaneously ineffective and not covering enough while being an overreach of the government on American liberties. When time came to demonstrate this new and improved healthcare plan, one Republicans had had since 2008 to come up with, the one they’d constantly assured the country was the best thing available, they unveiled…very little.

The Rust Belt was set to benefit the least from the new plan. Pre-existing conditions, such as those suffered on the factory floor, were no longer covered. Businesses were no longer enforced to provide healthcare, and in industries looking to cut costs to stay afloat, this would have been the first benefit to go. Despite Trump’s support and all Republican Rust Belt Senators’ votes, the plan failed in the upper house, and many who had supported his inauguration 2 months earlier breathed a sigh of relief. But this was just Trump appeasing the Republican Party on their biggest crusade of the last eight years, and now he’d get on with making America Great Again, right?

Trump’s other key legislation for 2017 were his new tax cuts, a long-term Republican goal that was meant to increase American industry by giving the business owners more income to hire and build in America, while letting the workers keep a bit more of their pay cheque. In reality, the cuts added $1.9 trillion to the deficit, and workers were unimpressed with their slight increase in pay when their bosses were now able to write their private jets off as tax deductible. With the economy steadily improving throughout his term (until the pandemic) due to a mix of Obama’s actions after the 2008 crash and the tax cuts pumping up the stock market, the blue-collar workers of America needed to know, where’s our legislation?

That question would be answered in 2018 once his Republican obligations were out of the way, with Trump announcing his new tariff policy, just in time for the midterms. His centrepiece Rust Belt revival plan added 25% to any import of steel or aluminium, expecting this encouragement to return enthusiasm to American manufacturers. While it did decrease the amount of steel being imported, it did little to restart domestic manufacturing, which if anything, hurt the Rust Belt more. Higher costs of steel simply kicked the unemployment can down the road (or rather the Interstate), with job cuts happening at the Chevrolet and General Motors car factories.

And even now, as Republicans in Congress are forced to declare where they stand on Trump’s legacy at his impeachment hearing, the most common defences (aside from witch hunt and fake news) are the outstanding economy he created (pre-pandemic) and his efforts to create peace in the Middle East. But to the forgotten workers of forgotten factories, Israel and Iran are abstract concepts. Trump campaigned on helping them, not getting mixed up in the Middle Eastern quagmire that had dominated George W. Bush’s term. Even as the pandemic struck in early 2020, the perfect time to cut America off from the rest of the world, Trump was too busy settling personal scores and assigning blame to help his voters, and with a measly $1,200 cheque provided in March, American voters had to admit that the Trump experiment had been a failure.

It is arguable how much Donald Trump ever cared for the Rust Belt. If the man has proved anything, it’s that everyone else are toys to be played with, tools to use when useful and throw aside when not. But there is a certain sense you get from his speeches, and rallies, and tweets (well…not anymore) that Trump wanted the voters more than the votes. These weren’t fans of the Trump business, or The Apprentice, or the Republican party, they were fans of Donald J. Trump, people willing to storm the capitol for him if he implied he wanted them to. And in return Trump told them what they wanted to hear, that they were the America of today and tomorrow, not yesterday.

And to say that Trump lost the Rust Belt would be incorrect. Indiana and the coal mining States of Kentucky and West Virginia stayed as Republican strongholds, with the mountaineer state returning Mitch McConnell to the Senate despite national unpopularity. Ohio stuck with Trump, breaking its 24 year-long streak of siding with the winner, while the all-important polls in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania flipped back to Democrats, sealing Biden’s win.

But if Trump did lose the Rust Belt, who can win it back? Both parties appear to be at a crossroads as to their direction. The Republicans have seen that Trumpism doesn’t have the national appeal needed to win the presidency, but his core is willing to follow his every word. And besides, they’ve attached themselves to him for the last four years, it’s hard to pivot now.

And for the Democrats, they won this round, but can they secure the votes again in 2024? Will Biden still be able to carry the States needed without Trump as the alternate on the ballot? Time will tell, and time is not on the side of the centrist Democrats. Biden will be 82 and Pelosi 84 in 2024, and with the young Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez and Omar practically begging for the torch to be passed. Their flagship proposal, the ‘Green New Deal’ would all but spell an end to the coal mining and manufacturing industries, but with provisions for retraining, free higher education and free healthcare. Some see it as Washington finally completing the sell-out of the American way for a pipe dream, others as the only way forward for a region stuck in the past. We’ll never know how it’s fully received until it’s on the ballot, and the establishment Democrats are doing everything they can to keep their seat at the head of the table.

And maybe now the electoral battleground turns South. Georgia’s shock flip to the Democrats in both the presidency and the Senate, and Trump’s surprising appeal to Latino men keeping Florida red (making it the first time the State hadn’t picked the winner since 1992), might mark the North East’s use as a political football coming to an end. We’ll see where it lies in either sides’ midterm plans, with the Republicans defending their 2016 Senate victories of Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, a sweep by either party could see the loser looking elsewhere, with new battlegrounds opening up with every demographic shift.

It is hard to say the future of a land stuck in the past. But for four glorious years, the people so used to watching the country move on without them had every candidate banging on their door, wondering what could be done to earn their vote. Donald Trump may have done a lot of damage to families, businesses, and democracy itself, but governments worldwide will see that an electorate with nothing left to lose will make sure their frustrations are felt nationwide.

[nathaniel-g-blog]

What saith the Lord?

“If you extract the precious from the worthless, you will become My spokesman.” 

- Jeremiah 15:19, as cited on the first page of John Bevere’s Thus Saith The Lord? How to know when God is speaking to you through another

“Watch out for fake heads deviled disguised men Arriving from the dawn and spawned with ill forms That'll leave you laying dead in the womb like stillborns” 

- Jedi Mind Tricks, “Heavenly Divine,” from the album Violent by Design

“We must put the DDT which destroys parasites, the bearers of disease, on the same level as the Christian religion which wages war on embryonic heresies and instincts, and on evil as yet unborn.” 

-Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth

This summer I begged Gillian Rose to tell me what to do. I had learned to disavow the desire to be seen as, to see myself as, a good person. I still wanted to create the conditions under which I could give birth to the person I wanted to be, and I wanted her to show me how. I also prayed. Answers were not forthcoming. Prophecy was contentious in my parents’ church tradition. Was it is about the future or the present? The present in light of the future or the future in light of the present? Was biblical prophecy primarily concerned with things to come or things which have already happened? Perhaps most importantly, how and through whom could God’s will be expressed with the opening qualifier “thus saith the Lord?” One of the first and only theological arguments I had with the woman I married was regarding slavery. I thought Christians should consider themselves slaves, with God as our master. This was non-negotiable. I was God’s property, and that meant desiring earnestly to perform mastery. I couldn’t become God, but I could become his messenger. The thought was enthralling. To desire mastery while insisting that you are a slave. The pleasure of power for those who have disavowed both. The structure of antagonism. I have heard enough parents tell me that they love the children they are abusing to suspect that reality itself is dysphoric. It is not that our desires don’t match onto the desires of others but that, as Paul observed, we do not even want the things we want. Our children, our bodies, our relations do not match themselves or what we think we need from them. We do not understand. Prophecy announced that things are not as they should be. This seemed to match my experience. All that was left to be adjudicated was how things are, how they should be, and the nature of their possible relation. One crude reading was that the way things are is the way we want them to be, the way they should be is how God wants them to be, and the nature of their relation is submission. I didn’t know anyone who wanted things to be the way they are. If we wanted to want something different, we had to remember that God had ordained the world as it actually was. Everything defined by its opposite, non-identical even with itself. The split in reality as the contest between what God wants and what we want. Sometimes the only way to know what God wants is to work backwards, to counterpose what we think as its obvious opposite. What do we actually want? This remains a mystery because our only concern is what God wants. The split exists as a projection, not covering over an underlying unity but positing one, the hope that we can once for all rid the world of its instability, that God can rid us of ourselves. We only wanted the things that God wanted; as it turned out we did not want anything at all. This year I realized that some patterns of life had been or become unlivable. I needed something different. I needed a word from God. Several people in my life had been preparing for such an opportunity, they wanted to encourage me and tell me that God did not want me to be miserable, but also to clarify that the way to be happy was more fully renouncing myself. I felt I had nothing left to renounce but was willing to try. Turn to God, turn away from yourself. But where was God to be found? Not anywhere on heaven or earth, it seemed. God was there, and if you didn’t suspend your powers of judgment and seek an illegible martyrdom, you would be sorry. But I already was. They insisted on a relationship with this God while implicitly asserting its impossibility. Accept the logically unacceptable. Raging against and insisting upon the permanence of melancholy. So lonely with this god, with no escape. This weekend I was in a basement looking for a Casio, looking to express feelings I didn’t understand on an instrument I understood even less. I stopped cold when I saw again the cover to the Manchester Orchestra album I'm Like a Virgin Losing a Child. It stopped me in my tracks as I remembered. Two things in particular I remember about that album: 1) the songs all sort of sound the same because they sort of are 2) listening and being sad about everything, about what I was and what I wasn’t, feeling loss and guilt without the pleasure of newness or promise, like my situation was indescribably special. It wasn’t, but I didn’t know that. I barely knew I had a situation. The way I came to recognize it was in misrecognizing the pain. I began with that album to mourn my inability to mourn. I felt I needed something else, and I did. The woman on that cover looks like she needs a word from the Lord, but might be the only person in the room, besides the camera.

“The archival photograph is a time-stamped, carceral text.”- Zoé Samudzi

This weekend I thought about prophecy and remembered Bevere’s book. Its basic argument is that if we do not learn to separate true from false, we will not know what God is saying, and without a vision we will perish. It is thick with talk of eradicating disease, pollutants, corruption, defilement; the story of Hagar and Ishmael is a metaphor for the ontological split between promise and flesh, or between the flesh which does or does not possess promise. Christians in Bevere’s account should be the paradigmatic racial scientists. A Christianity premised on distinctions, which can ultimately make none; Christianity as the police.

In 2005 Jus Allah released his solo debut album All Fates Have Changed. I found it enthralling. He opens by declaring that he is “beyond measure” and “supreme authority over the universe.” That felt good to sing along with, even though I knew he wasn’t talking about me. I was a young white dude in Manchester,New Hampshire, but I could pretend. He was “a runaway slave with back scars” and an “immaculate being.” The white devils who hurt him would come to be sorry. He promised to “release aggression…explode like atomic weapons…Go into deep spells of demonic possession.” He has words for all his enemies: “Y'all corny motherfuckers sound repetitive, it’s safe to say, I'm the smartest man that's ever lived. I am negative, I will kill a relative.” What else is Jus Allah? “pure darkness, sparkless, glitterless, imageless, but still infinitely limitless… placed on the planet just to cause problems… from the master race exactly, God of the planet, boss of the factory.” He is contradictory. He tells us that tomorrow never comes, and why it cannot: “My stomach got young dead orphans in it; I eat from trash cans at abortion clinics.”

“the blackened-not-blackened fetus is stuck—suspended between a blackness whose freedom cannot commence and cannot be withstood, a blackness that cannot be born and cannot be borne.” -Jared Sexton

Prophecy is the negotiation of power and knowledge which shape conditions for life in the world. Prophecy can be a matter of opening or closing possibilities. I do not want to undersell the apparent strangeness of the behaviors at the church services where I met God, nor the extent to which this strangeness was performance of a denial of difference. You could speak up in protest, directed towards the Other outside and in yourself. In the end, every word from God must be an affirmation, an encouragement.  

This essay is not about prophecy but about my relation to it. I grew up knowing that meaning implies domination, and that man’s search for it required acceptance of roles of master and slave, of Man, that to resist domination required an end to the possibility of even provisional meaning. Prophecy could be a way of ensuring that everyone can live or determining who must not. The prophecy to which I found myself attracted was an aborted negativity. Negativity insofar as it recognized that things were wrong, but a negativity which ultimately aspired to be content with itself as God, to a heavenly place in the world whose gates could eventually be shut. Negativity as the problem which required the promise of prophecy to solve.

Prophecy was a way of denying the obvious: “a disaster's a disaster no matter what Christian language you drag it through.” It was like my divorce: a split produced by the desire for wholeness and the repression of an originary split. One thing I knew for sure was that I shouldn’t follow my own agenda, but instead God’s. One thing I could not have known is that God did not have one, and neither did I, and that if I could not have the split I thought I wanted, I could at least try to know the one I had.

“Our historic mission is to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers of blood.” -Frantz Fanon

How was I to know when God’s agenda came to earth? “Your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.” As a young child I was haunted by night terrors. Animals at night, outside my window, usually on the neighbor’s roof. I could not resist looking out the window at them. I was not afraid of what they would do to me. They just watched. I was afraid of them because of what they knew. White nightmares. I could not rest.

Everyone knows that immaculate conceptions are impossible, that they are only possible with God, and that the eventual experience of premature death is really another part of his plan. When something feels wrong, you may want a word from God. But prophecy is like an army of locusts. Who can endure it?

(What helped me write this: Amaryah Armstrong, Alex Haley, Gil Anidjar, other readers of Lacan)  

[tamikkogivesbrain]

Obsessed or nah?

Mental illness or nah?

Weird Twilight Zone Episode or nah?

Restraining order or nah?

This whole story makes me sad. I honestly wish people lived to love themselves more. Being inspired by someone is why we are all put on this planet. Envy, competition, weak mindsets and low vibrational intentions are things We as a Collective need to move out of. If someone is offended by you copying them, stop copying them. Do not move into someone else’s life out of spite. Create your own. Grow to love Yourself.

Introspective by: TAMIKKO BEASTY

What is Divine Masculine and Feminine?

In the same way, the feminine is waking up to her divine qualities and offering these gifts to the world, so the masculine is awakening to a new (actually old) way of being with the feminine. ... The awakening masculine supports the feminine aspect in visionary women and men, so they can bring their gifts into the world.

What is Divine Feminine?

Since the Divine Feminine is a concept grounded in spirituality, definitions can vary depending on who you ask. ... In other words, the Divine Feminine represents the connection to the part of your consciousness responsible for nurture, intuition, and empathy, regardless of your gender.

What is divine energy?

The most important part of the human body is the latent divine energy which lies between our skins to inner conscience, the potential energy or Shakti. ... In yogic parlance the soul is called 'purusha shakti' and energy of nature is called 'prakriti shakti'or kundalini energy.

I wrote a story months back about a person impersonating my essence for many years. I wrote it from a generic 3D perspective. Mostly because I did not want to dig deep. (This whole blog is filled with sci-fi episodes of The Twilight Zone.) I have been in review of True Self lately. The end cap to a very lonnnng journey inward, and away from secular conditioning. As I gear my mind to mentally go back to the superficial world of product and presentation... a path led me here. More homework.

I had this great initial strive for a career in pop culture dance for my whole entire existence. It led to many amazing things and wonderful, out of this world experiences. But the one thing that was always missing... True Love. I have had encounters I called love, mislabeled partners twin flames when they weren’t... only to find my heart forever lacking. There is a person I have always known to be my Twin. My real twin. I met him long ago and labeled him my best friend, a “brother”, my family, and ran. I saw him and he was familiar. A blaze in my eye that was too hard to hold on to. Broken from my own past and hurts I couldn’t handle experiencing love or real committed connection. We eventually collided years later. Volcanic. But life changing. I ran again. In between these things there was always a person looming in the background. Feeding on his weakness and vulnerability.

I’m trying to find places to resolve what I feel and step into 8D reasoning.

We had Union. The Union was beyond and close. Implosive again. All while this 3rd Party person still stalked and emulated, competed from afar. She felt slighted. That something was taken away from her... him.

I believe in love.

I believe in blinding, heart yielding, gut wrenching love. I believe if you love someone and you know in your heart they belong to another... release them. I did this twice. She captured him twice. From the outside it looked believable. Like he did belong to her. Even tho I could see... his heart was inside of me. I wanted him to live his highest self possible. She convinced him to marry, it was based in false pretenses, manipulation, abuse, coherion. They imploded. Divorce. Bad feelings.

He called me.

After a century of distance and walking through the trenches of hell without each other.

I came.

I put my soul into healing my friend. Twin Flame Unions are not perfect. It’s volatile. It’s scary. It’s co-dependence, sometimes dysfunctional. Come together to fall apart... all while your heart cracks on the inside. I set my twin free again. Against the internal part of my being. So he can find a freedom to choose his own destiny. Be really happy and manifest His Truth.

So I went on another journey of Self just recently. Information came flooding my way like The Universe wanted me to know... in heart break you are not alone.

Twin Flame Energy, The Divine Feminine (DF), The Masculie Energy (DM), and The Karmic.

Sometimes You can be a Karmic and mess up someone else’s relationship by cheating with their spouse. When you work through your 3D carnal exertions and choices... you ascend. You move your energy out of lower base thinking and doing. You walk into your Power and become Divine. The Divine Feminine Awakens and this sends a Universal Signal to her Divine Masculine to unite. Unite and form a Union so Their Universal duty/ soul contract begins to manifest. This is to guide The Spiritual Collective forward. People in low base thinking can see or sense this. People who live in “black” energy use negativity and negative actions to hold other people back so Twin Flames have harder times meeting or coupling. Sometimes this is out of conscious jealousy, envy, and lack. It can also be out of greed and arrogance. Even revenge on one or both parties. When you come across 2 partners who are Destined as Twin Flames... the energy is so obvious people are constantly compelled to point out your similarities. In looks, Energy, and Vibe. An irresistible love for One Another that the whole world recognizes and can see.

It’s meant to be.

In New York I was super busy all of the time. Had no time to look over my shoulder and see who was chasing me. He saw me. She saw him seeing me... and has been chasing me ever since. She was not kind to my twin. Trying to force my likeness over him. Almost as if to trick... maybe compete. To fool or convince him him she is The Divine Feminine. I never stopped to think how deep it all got until this last year. How much damage was done to my friend.

Hurt people hurt people. I am not perfect. I hurt people too. Unraveling different parts of myself everyday. The difference is the True Divine Feminine can’t fake her existence. She does not force or manipulate. When she fights, she is fighting for what The Divine Masculine actually wants for himself... deep in his own soul... even if it’s breaking her own bond with him. A Karmic Energy fakes and manipulates. Usually for a selfish purpose and plays the Soulmate game to entrap a person.

The dilemma.... tell the truth or let my heart sit back and pretend it’s ok for people to do things like this. In my research there are people who go in depth about Spiritual things and The War Fare that takes place. But never actually faces to the movies. I’m posting because is the obsession she has with me or is it over him? Or maybe the need for fake fame and competition coming from some broken place serves like a flame for her.

This knowledge of Twin Flame Journies inspired me to write. Our Union inspired friends to marry and some to pursue higher love. So I wondered what was always coming in between us. Karmic ties can also be friends or family members who have selfish motives to keep True Loves apart. Sometimes people are just sad and do dark things. And sometimes people just need to heal from their own paths. We collide into poachers looking for planets to rob and fill. We are planets. If we fail to fill ourselves with love, it makes it easier for parasitic energy to take over. Vampire based people are attracted to Epathic Energy. People ascending to higher levels are usually Empaths with beautiful, giving energy. Bottom feeders recognize this... and feed.

The goal is to not become a bottom feeder yourself from encountering so many dark connections and fight your way through Yourself back to Your Higher Existence.

When on This Journey The Twin Flame appears. Bumping back into one another until Union finally takes hold or peaceful resolvement to let go is established between The Divine Masculine and The Divine Feminine.

I desire for my True Twin to be his happiest Self. With me or away from Me... love is undefineable and no moments are regretted.

There is a massive Spiritual Shift in The Collective Human Consciousness and on The Planet. Recognize Heart Power and True Intentions. The time for hiding or wearing false masks is over. All truth will prevail.

It’s time for true love and life purpose. The rest is bullshit.

Muse your heart. Listen to your gut. If it feels wrong... it’s probably fake. Or in my case, an imposter.

If you recognize yourself as a Karmic, look inward. Do the work to heal yourself and break unnatural bonds you may be keeping over people who do not belong to you. If you steal from The Universe, you will be required to pay in karmic lessons that keep you bound to 3D black hole existing.

If you are a Twin Flame on path to Enlightenment. Be honest. Love Yourself. Heal Yourself. Pray. Do good works. Spread pure love. Repeat.

Fight For Love.

~T

Click Link Below for more disturbing info👇🏼:

UPDATE: She currently is stealing Spiritual Information I have written about here and is starting a newsletter of her own... As she reports my IG Page 7-8 times a day to have this tumblr link dismantled... only to use bits of my information in daily newsletter posts to portray herself as “Enlightened”, “Woke AF”, & Gives “Self- Awareness” tips. 👀

How, Sway?!

She now calls herself a “Light Worker”.

These things are not to be played with... or taken lightly. Pray for Real People to see around this Fake Lost One.

This Is The Spiritual Battle. Being played out in various ways, on very many stages and platforms. True Divine Energy: Continue to be what is Born and Genuine INSIDE of You. That cannot be forged... only mocked by Jealous Entities like the person who is obsessed with trying to be Me. Keep fighting for Truth. If You are a true born healer, or carry light to help change The World, Uphold True Meaning in Your Existence and Purpose. No fake creation, test, or obstacles can change that or take that which is Divine in True Divine Beings...away from You.

To The Fake 1s: Beware. The Wicked Shall Perish... On DOPE.

The Future Come’ith.

[sashaburenkov]

CITIZENSFIVE

26 – 28 May 2017

Artists:

Philipp Timischl / Christopher Kulendran Thomas & Annika Kulmann / Albert Soldatov / Manolis Daskalakis-Lemos / Sasha Litvintseva / Alexey Vanushkin / MSL & Jaakko Pallasvuo / Pakui Hardware / CORE PAN / Beny Wagner / Jacky Connolly / Elizaveta Chukhlantseva / Lawrence Lek / Stephanie Comilang / Sara Culman / Viktor Timofeev / Jesse McLean / Eleni Bagaki / Erica Scourti / Bogdan Ablozhnyy / Louis Henderson / Valinia Svoronou / Graeme Arnfield / EKKE (Egor Kraft, Pekka Tynkkynen, Karina Goulbenko, Alina Kvirkveliya) / Patrick Staff /  Egle Kulbokaite & Dorota Gaweda / Felix Kalmenson / Jasper Spicero / Hannah Perry

Curated by Alexander Burenkov

In January 2013, Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker who had been working for several years on a film about surveillance and monitoring programs in the US in the wake of 9/11, received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself "Citizenfour." In it, he offered her insider information about illegal wiretapping practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies.

Since then the world has drastically changed. In the post-Brexit world governed by both post-truth politics and sharing economy, the new urgencies of migration and resettlement as well as the changing concepts of citizenship and nationality and related to it new forms of anxieties emerge to restructure our lives. It’s not only creative prosumers roaming the world or Londoners moving to Athens for affordable rent, but also platform citizenship and social networks that are giving birth to the new digital, nomadic post-Snowden generation, “citizensfive” living a world in which everything is constantly visible and boundaries between the private and the public are blurred. Invisibility has been lost to the digital revolution — but why should that matter?

The idea of temporary spaces of habitation is something that we are experiencing in our daily lives. As we keep plugging more and more into car-sharing vehicles or Airbnb rooms, people own less while becoming more nomadic and less attached to anything like a stable home. This is one aspect of a transformation that is also causing a great amount of pain and anxieties in terms of the forced mobility, precariousness and insecurity, roommate after roommate. On the other hand, there is enormous potential in terms of public space in those small, private places. The only way Edward Snowden was able to do what he did was because he was in a «non-place», transit space of a hotel room 1014 at the Mira Hong Kong, a chic, «eco-friendly» hotel in Hong Kong’s shopping and entertainment district. A screening room of the exhibition CITIZENSFIVE designed as a hotel room referring to a typically blank transit space, where the videos by contemporary artists screened on a large LED screen will replace the «fake news» of modern TV channels, and will take a look at the reality beyond post-truth bubble, constructed by media, corporate, and state interests.

In the age of universal acceleration, our mind and body change, adapting to the environment in which we find ourselves. Blurred boundaries make us rethink our identity, we rethink our goals as human species and our citizenship is also lost in translation and found in transitional spaces of inter-zones, non-places of airports, hotels and Airbnb flats. In somato-, techno- or biocapitalism the body is no longer integral, but is fragmented and penetrated by new technologies that, in Paul Preciado’s parlance, are «soft, featherweight, viscous, gelatinous». Technology and hyper-capitalism have produced us – artists and all – as its «users».

The artists of the video section deal with themes ranging from surveillance politics, precarious lifestyle, hyperconnection and disunity at the same time, the problems of other dimensions of lost corporeality (no longer a «body without organs», but a virtual «body without flesh»), global communication networks and local communities.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann in theirs video from their long-term artwork in the form of a startup «New Eelam», are wondering what could a new Eelam be if the idea of a self-governed state based on equality for all its citizens was imagined as a distributed network rather than a territorially bounded nation. New Eelam is based on re-engineering some of these structural operations of art and some of the property relations at the very heart of the present economic system - through collective access rather than individual ownership.

Sasha Litvintseva’s «Evergreen», follows an immortal traveller’s journey through failed and aspirational utopias , a series of uninhabited theme parks, postmodern museums and abandoned cities that signify islands of dislocated time, somewhere in a possible future Japan. Such wanderings allow Litvintseva to create a mesmeric experience, that subtly suggests the perpetual struggle for a perfect society and how the unquenchable desire of civilization to document itself, is perhaps driven by an unconscious awareness of its looming demise.

MSL & Jaakko Pallasvuo’s «Bridge Over Troubled Water» reimagines 1960s musical duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as time-travelling protagonists whose association with a more hopeful era is at sharp odds with our increasingly precarious contemporary existence. Named after Simon & Garfunkel’s best selling album, Bridge Over Troubled Water follows them as they navigate past, present, and future post-human landscapes. Together they experience personal and ecological loss, entropy, and the impact of our insatiable fossil fuel consumption.

The character of Albert Soldatov's «Main Road» is in some kind of prostration, confusion, being exposed to alien forces, it turns off the usual route, its path is distorted and influenced by global media viruses, penetrating into everyday reality from the outside and infecting the character. The impact of these memes is unclear and unrecordable, only by changing behavior one can determine that something has gone wrong. We can notice the actions of atomized subjects, but do not interpret them, regardless of whether they are strange or ordinary. Their actions are dictated by the hermetic logic of the media entity.

Pakui Hardware's «Imprint»  speculates about imprinting as a form of shaping someone’s memories and experiences. Imagines a scenario when it is possible to ‘imprint’ into someone’s memory experiences that never took place. This way making it impossible to distinguish between real and imaginary things. How will be able to deal with this when we become digital subjectivities? In the era of Anthropocene, imprint has become a term that encompasses the interaction between physical bodies, materials and surfaces as well as between invisible but yet transforming forces such as flows of Capital. Thus imprint is both an intimate proximity between materials, bodies, surfaces and at the same it is a play of forces: there is always the one who presses the other, the softer, which functions as a surface for the other’s hard body (both political and material). It also incorporates temporality – the converge of the past, present and the future – because it requires time to become an imprint, to make an imprint.

Philipp Timischl's «Problems» is thematically and formally embedded in the American series “In Treatment” that deals with the problems of psychotherapy patients and those of the therapist himself. Framed as an image inside an image of the opening sequence of the series—a blue, watery streak swirling across the screen—a dialog commences through the addition of various sequences from the series that do not lack urgency and intensity. However, due to the source material— originally ranging for example from events on an English estate in the 18th century (“Downton Abbey“) to the present in the south of the United States (“True Blood”)—, various actors and actresses and a wide variety of emotions the film is characterized by complete misunderstandings, abrupt subject changes and meaningless data noise.

Patrick Staff «Weed Killer» was inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness – a moving and often irreverent account of the author’s experience of cancer. Contrasting a monologue, in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy, with comparatively otherworldly sequences, including choreographic gestures shot with high-definition thermal imaging. The video suggests a complex relationship to one’s own suffering and draws into focus the fine line between alternately poisonous and curative substances.

With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston has degenerated into post-apocalyptic delirium at Laurence Lek's «Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit edition)» video. This is a drowned world of the near future, filled with the ruins of metropolitan life: forgotten nightclubs, DIY art installations, neon-lit music venues, Election booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. Building upon Lek’s original project for Open Source 2015, this site-specific simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As the player roams around, fragments of European voices appear: samples from Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Lars Von Trier’s Europa speak to them about the nature of dislocation. It is a gradual, but relentless, meeting of past, present, and future.

Jasper Spicero's "Behind The Scenes" is a personal look at the process of filming "Centers In Pain" at Wapato Jail, a maximum security facility built 9 years ago in Portland, Oregon. After it’s completion in 2004 Wapato was abandoned due to a lack of operating funds, and it has been idle and in pristine condition for 10 years and has never once housed inmates, remaining empty aside from a small janitorial staff that maintains the plumbing and washes dusty bed sheets. To carry out "Centers In Pain", one in a series narrative works by Jasper Spicero about Rehabilitation, Correction, Infrastructure and Trauma, the artist rented for 4 days prison Wapato. Occasionally a film crew is allowed to enter for a small fee. The project culminated in a screenplay for an imaginary movie, documentation of the sculptures installed in the prison, and a short film documenting the life of an alienated tribe of people living in a contemporary Panopticon by its own rules.

Sara Culman' s digital video «Props for daily misunderstanding» investigates the political sensibility of objects included in daily household ritual of modern citizens.  The artist puts the focus on individual items, called "props", which simulate human relations concerning the problems of a geopolitical treaty. The image rendering system used in video games, as well as the subjective camera's view, the so-called spectator mode, is put on the basis of the image visualization, which is a mode of the observer in which there is a physically impossible operator floating like  a spirit above the photorealistic world.

Viktor Timofeev's «Continuum» is a short computer-generated video that centers on the relationship between two entities that populate a deserted landscape. These are a group of cockroaches and a pack of hovering drones existing in a symbiotic relationship, engaged in constant observation, mutual surveillance and pursuit of one another without ever coming into contact. The video cuts between first person views of both entities, attempting to elicit an empathetic response to both positions.

Erica Scourti's «Body Scan» captures the process of photographing various parts of the artist's body and parsing them through a visual search app, which attempts to identify them and link to the relevant online data. A documented gesture of mediated intimacy told through iPhone screenshots, the video narrates an exchange between lovers, while making literal the objectification of female bodies on the Internet.

Graeme Arnfield's «Sitting in Darkness» explores the circulation, spectatorship and undeclared politics of contemporary images and new forms of anxieties. Out of the darkness a sound emerges. It echoes and drones. Terrified people take to the streets in search of its source. They get their cameras out and document the sky, searching for an author. We watch on, sitting in darkness, our muscles contract and our pupils dilate.“I hope the camera picks this up.”

The screening program will confront our uneasiness at being swept along by the digital tide, with a view to better understanding of our modern hyperlinked society by offering new perspectives on conceprtualizing our contemporary identities, it will broach the question whether the self is even more otherworldly than we fear it is.

Venue: 

Faliro (Tae Kwon Do) Pavilion, Athens – Greece 

Moraitini 2, Faliro Pavillion Hellenic Olympic Properties, Paleo Faliro 175 61

http://www.artathina.gr/

http://www.flashartonline.com/2017/06/art-athina-athens/

http://www.aqnb.com/2017/06/21/32-international-video-artists-respond-to-new-urgencies-citizensfive-at-art-athina/

https://www.facebook.com/events/2022611044633477/

[riting]

Jeanine Durning in conversation with Jennie Liu

Jeanine Durning in conversation with Jennie Liu

As you describe your practice of non-stopping, you often describe it as emerging out of a “critical nature” of what it means to keep going in the face of everything that arises that might stop you. The word “critical” is ubiquitous in our field, and I’m curious: What does it mean to do or to be “critical” in the context of inging?

I can say it another way: What is the operation that propels me, or anyone, into a place of asserting and reasserting their presence, their aliveness,​ from moment to moment? Assertion here is not about aggression, it’s of the self (that over time also can include other selves). A fluidity of identities or thought processes or embodiments. I think this fluidity and adaptability is a crucial—critical—skillset to tone, to tune these days.

Sometimes I joke when teaching class that we’re really not working on dance necessarily: we are including dance as a frame for what we are doing, but really what we’re doing is preparing the body for the apocalypse. Some people get it and some people aren’t sure where that’s coming from. I don’t mean it in a dramatic way, but more in a practical way. What are the skillsets needed to deal with the very real political, with moral and ethical issues that are going on right now. And how much can we give of ourselves in every moment?

I guess this is a meandering way to talk about criticality. It’s necessary. There are no two ways of getting around it. We have to do it.

That’s my favorite definition of the word critical. I was hoping you would go there.

Of course if I think about criticality from another perspective, there is a self-reflexive nature to what I’m doing that is also self-analytical and self-observable. That it’s not just about “ go go go and anything goes and just do it and whatever comes is fine.” It’s about as looping process of self-to-other, of assimilation-to-production, and how this feedback loop is constant, and generative, and productive.

From the very start, before I even thought about it as a  performance, I set up this condition of sitting at a table with a camera.I wasn’t really thinking about the camera as the “other,” I was thinking about it as simply recording. But after a couple of months of doing it I realized that there was this fictional “other” that I was always referring to, and that “other” was an essential part of the work. Without it, it risks narcissism or solipsism. I think what’s potentially interesting about the work is that it has all these different indexes that the audience is using to understand how they are supposed to be relating to the it of it. Is it psychotherapy? Is it a lecture-performance? Is it a spoken word performance? Is it a dance?

Once the mind of the room drops in to understanding that this is not an informational experience, that it’s more this empathetic loop, then it really starts to ride a different kind of organization. Some of the most interesting feedback I’ve gotten over the years is that some  people describe that they lose track of what I’m saying and they go into their own mind and thought process, and they wander off on these rhizomatic directions of thinking, and then they come back into the room. They experience this kind of zooming-in and zooming-out, which is also the process I’m having.

You talk about inging as being unscripted. How do you train yourself to go off the map? How have you structured your practice to allow you to rigorously, continuously bypass what you have done and said before?

It’s sort of like understanding one’s patterns of movement. It’s the same kind of working a muscle. The longer I’ve been in the practice, the more tuned I am to those patterns of thinking, and how a concrete thought can associate into another. Noticing the opportunities that present themselves out of the indirect-compositional-mind rather than the learned-compositional-mind.

But that’s not something that came naturally. I have a very complicated relationship to language… it’s not very fluid for me. My father was an actor, but I was always more of an observer of that world, which is probably why I gravitated toward movement. I was very mute as a child, and it took a long time for me in coming into my own as a maker, to articulate what my processes were, and trying to understand the many aspects to it. And this is where this work emerged from: going into a studio to really try and understand what my practice was, and not only track it through movement, but to track it through articulating language.

So when I say it’s unscripted, when it’s really working is when I do not know what I’m going to say.

The work for me was never about trying to come up with new material, but rather to follow the mind, and to accept the materials that are present as they are occurring. So if I TRY to do or say something different I’m probably not inging – not in the continuous present of doing thinking into languaging. I’m probably then in the past and trying to subvert the past to create something “new.” Which can be seductive, and is often a pressure.

So when you ask what are the things that it needs—it needs practice under many different conditions and since I’ve had the opportunity of performing it under many different conditions over the years it’s built a kind of immune system and an archive. But that archive is more in the recesses. Sometimes I have this organization of language that’s related to the body. Like I’ll move my arm, and it will trigger all of these things I’ve said before in relation to that action. And that’s the archive moving into the present. There exists a sort of time fluidity somehow.

I’ve developed this tool box, this man-sized oversized tool box, rather than the 1950s housewife-sized tool box. So in that I say I’m using everything that I have. I’m using all the resources that I have. And the more I’m able to use it, the more I’m capable that I’m actually accepting that I’m entering into this true void that I’m not able to keep track of. I’m always moving forward into the next thought. I’m not trying to construct how one thought is in relationship to the next, which is about meaning making. I’m trying to push forward, push forward into the next thought.

You’ve talked about this space as being a space of vulnerability. And there was one moment in a conversation you had in Berlin, where you made this really amazing declaration “authenticity does not have a place in the creative realm, which I loved so much. I thought that was provocative in the face of what is so highly valued in particular trends, in contexts where performance lives in the visual arts. And I’m curious about how you might differentiate the idea or experience of “vulnerability” from the idea or experience of “authenticity,” if there can be such a thing to you.

I think, post that conversation in Berlin, artists (and most people in general now) are trying to understand how they situate themselves in relation to what is “real” and what is “fake,” and how their work can affect real change that goes beyond ideologies or concepts or aesthetics.

In specific relation to that conversation though, what’s valuable to me, not only in my own practice and work but also in the work of others is not craftsmanship, necessarily. If I can see the device, or if there’s an indication that the maker knows that I know that this is really clever, it drives me up the wall. There’s something about seeing somebody work something out, like literally being in this place of it unfolding in front of people, and what that does not only to the performer—destabilizing their knowledge or virtuosity—but also what it does to the audience—destabilizing them from getting that satisfaction of watching that virtuosity—that’s the element of vulnerability. And it lives in the realm of empathy.

Now that would seem to be in contradiction to this idea of authenticity. I love when things are real. I do. And authenticity to me is more about doing what it takes to, give more of who you are and if that means a fabrication of a reality then that is ok. I try to accept that authenticity is already there, it’s not something I need to make happen. I think the drive of a lot of artists to ‘be authentic’ and devaluing those artists that ‘aren’t authentic’ blocks the potential of how much more there is at our fingertips and the resources that we have—the fantastic, the irreverent (which is essentially pushing up against constructed realities), the perceptual, the imaginative, our memories which are also constructions—and I’m just in a place where I need all that I can get. I need everything. I need the rigor of the insistence mixed with the lightness of play, and without both of those things together, the thing isn’t working personally for me. Either seeing it or doing it. Sometimes this pressure to be authentic is its own construction, its own fabrication.

I noticed in watching you speak that a lot of your references are ones from a theatrical lineage. You often quote dramatists like Beckett and Shakespeare and Pinter, and you mentioned saying your father was an actor, so perhaps that is one connection.. But I want to ask—in what ways do you need theater? How has theater lived in your work historically, and now in inging?

Theater is a huge element of my history, and it’s sort of embedded in my understanding of the world. I can zoom in and out of the frame of theater. Understanding politics in that way, understanding media in that way, understanding how we are socialized in that way. So that’s the “zoom out.” And the “zoom in” is: how are we literally constructing our realities, and what is that drive for many of us that are makers?

There’s something about the theatrical realm that is actually a perfect space to share these notions of fluidity and disorganization, re-organization, re-understanding. I think the space of the theater is ironically the perfect space for that because it’s a space of holding, you know? It’s a space of attention, of attending to.

With inging, I think without that theatrical frame people wouldn’t accept it. “Oh, that’s just somebody talking out of her ass.”

What are the elements of the frame, like how does the theatrical frame materialize? How is it visible?

It’s in the grounding of the set, which is the table, which takes on many different indexes. It organizes people in relationship to this fixed object, which is in a way a symbol of authority, or knowledge, or even of the stage.

There’s also the camera that frames and is capturing the moment, and the video projecting iterations that have happened in the past. It’s a theatrical frame of understanding the fluidity of time, the past moving into the present, the future not yet known, but also concrete. It’s making visible what I’m working on in the speech, which is passing in and out of saying actually what is happening right now, or a memory, or something that I’m imagining.

And there is a stack of books on the table, which began as a practical thing for me—I was in a studio and I needed to place the camera on something, so I put it on the bunch of books I had with me, research on linguistics, and philosophy, and poetry, and how the mind and body are not separate, and how gesture is related to how the mind works. I think that stack of books points to a kind of knowledge-making, meaning-making. Our existential understanding of who it is we are, and how that gets constructed into language and modes of thinking—philosophical, theatrical, poetical.

In terms of my referencing of those frames, they’re inside a personal archive. And that personal archive gets pushed into the frontal lobe with inging. Things that are sort of memories kind of get pushed into the foreground.

I’m curious about that. I’m curious about the way you use the term “belief system” in relation to what is driving this work. You interchange that term with “commitment” and “insistence,” but “belief system” really resonates with me. If it is a belief system that is driving you, then what are the tenets of that system and what are its traditions? What are its totems?

As you talk about what in your personal archive gets pushed to the foreground as you practice this, I’m curious about what has emerged that has surprised you? I’m wondering about the mystery of the thing. Because you’ve been doing it for a long time.

Yeah, it’s kind of crazy how long it’s been. I did the first public performance of it in 2010. And I feel like it’s one of those works that as long as I can tune to the rigor of attention, there’s a sustainability, because it has adaptability.

You know those happenstance things? Like you arrive at something through a doing, and it all of a sudden has a life, you know? I’m only a part of it. And maybe that’s a good lead in to what this belief system is. And I actually think that it’s very concrete. The doing makes it concrete, and material even, though what gets produced sometimes is very mysterious or “other.”

What does it mean for me to give more than what I feel I’m capable of? And what are the modes of that process? What is the action of that? The real concrete doing of that? Which then allows another sense of be-ing to exist, which is a kind of a self undoing itself. It’s a selfhood that’s not defining itself, but is kind of stripping away, or in a perpetual state of becoming.

If I think about totems, the one that I can’t get away from is G(g)od. That’s a part of my history that I’ve worked really hard at erasing, but I think what I mean is facing a void, the unknown. Facing an edge, and falling off of it, and trusting that we are held by something larger than our immediate selves.

Honestly, sometimes I never get there in inging. Sometimes something happens, but not because I will it to happen. It’s happening because of a confluence in the room, if I allow myself to be porous enough. I think I call it a “belief system” because it is something that drives me beyond what I think I can do. If I just did the operation knowing that it’s going to produce A, B and C— as if it has an end goal with a known outcome that I’m asking people to get this particular experience—I wouldn’t do it. It would feel like nothing.

In a way it is nothing. And that’s part of the vulnerability, the terror realm, there. That I don’t know if it’s going to work. All I can ask of myself is that I am putting myself, all of myself, into it. And that requires a belief system that something, something more than myself, might be produced for everyone in the room. What that thing is I’m not sure. It’s like that space of the unknown that Beckett talks about all the time. Using language to completely eradicate language. Language as an absurd construct that ultimately falls short in creating meaning or understanding or purpose, though we rely on it to find meaning. It’s an ontological conundrum. The meaning of the self is completely disappearing as it articulates itself.

Jeanine Durning’s inging will be presented at Automata in partnership with Los Angeles Performance Practice on May 12 and 13 at 8 pm. 

Jennie Liu makes performances and videos under the hostname Grand Lady Dance House. She is based in Los Angeles.