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jonathankatwhatever · 4 years ago

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You might want to read the end first and the come to the top. You know I love to skip to the ending. I not only prefer reducing my otherwise uncontrollable anxiety but I want to see if the story works when you know the end. That’s what makes a great story: that you want to hear it even though you know how it comes out.

I find myself typing nonsense because I want to fight with you about nothings. I no longer have interest in fighting about somethings. Maybe this will turn into a nothing I can post.

I forgot to mention in escapism that it isnt romantic to elegize past existences of self; it’s required. Is a process romantic? Yes, but the sense of backward looking has to both romanticize and whatever you want to pair it with as opposite because the gaps are important. I always go all the way back to Donne: phrased in what we now label as romantic, that metaphor is concrete because the bell counts the age of the one who died. Romantic poetry became more self-consciously romantic, constructing metaphors so Keats dies every evening, not merely when the bell tolls. So, yeah, that’s romantic. But it’s also truthful because you write a lot about reactions to loss of various kind of innocence and of self. But that’s not romantic love on its own, only in the larger context. And that is what bothered me so much about the thread that runs from Shelley through Wallace Stevens: the creation of the imaginary within the poetic world becomes too personal without being personally real, and I find that becomes self-feeding-selfish. This is what I specifically meant about ‘new’ creation; it’s more a restoration of real connections of inspiration to metaphor without the intervening layers by which the inspiration becomes remote. I sometimes think the highpoint of that is George Harrison’s Within lines about arriving without traveling and seeing all without looking. Taken into Western conceptions, they lose their Hindu basis, which means they developed on a long line only to be lopped off and implanted on another mentality which barely grasps where that might come from in their own traditions. I love that song.

I can never take what you say as face value. An example is in exile, if I took at face value that they’re like me at a party when I was a teen, and my ex girlfriend is there with her new boyfriend, then fine except that was never exile; that was the right thing to do and happen. And that’s the norm; those things dont matter beyond the first times because that was the right thing even if it takes a while to burn off regrets. And the blame reflects how you feel about your own conduct, because you realize you are the problem because you dont fit and something in you resisted fitting better. Leaving those issues unresolved is best. So to me the song only achieves depth if you view exile as a word that doesnt mean moved on and happy with someone else. But if they could never communicate, why bother? The normal approach is Life In The Fast Lane: good in bed, but cant communicate beyond physical passion. Which wears off. Which isnt romantic either but that’s how people see romance: as a series of losses in which there were outstanding moments of passion which illuminated the darkness. Working on my night moves. One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends trying in vain to breathe the fire we were born in.

I dont think that way. There was a story about a lobsterguy who for 15 years has had a relationship with a seagull. They hang out essentially every day. For 15 years. The bird got hurt and he caught it and took it to the vet, and now they’re back together out on his boat in the Gulf of Maine. That’s love. To me, that’s love because it’s the daily acts which they choose each day to bind themselves to each other. In my imagination, I want someone who would share a toothbrush and a fork with me. I dig my fingers into Billy’s neck to work out the little bits that get into his fur, and to pick at any attachment that might be a tick, and because it feels good for both of us, though it’s also work for me. I share my food with him. When Prince was here, I showed him every single thing I ate because he asked. If he liked it, I’d share with him. I’ve seen you feed the cat. If people learned to feed birds - beyond putting out a feeder and watching - they’d feel what it’s like to work with a flock and how you bind yourself to them. The same as a shepherd or preacher. That is the covenant at root: the daily acts, every breath, the sun rise and set, the shift of season, and you.

So again, sure you can set a raw moment, but if that’s it, then I dont ‘get’ it at all because exile clearly refers to man without a country. And the internal references to defending and offending cross connect to develop all the meanings because you’re that good. And you still wont say it. You edge closer. Yeah, they didnt get Lover. They wont credit her. I’ve been saying that for years: they wont credit the female version of you. Too many layers. And you posed challenges to maleness which they need to pass off as facile because they’re otherwise too true.

I dont know. To me, the mark of a really great song is that it can fit where you need to sing it. So I imagine a mom and her son, and the son realizes he’s no longer the center of her life and she realizes the same, which is the process. I think about that as I watch moms with sons: they can never know each other the same when he becomes a male because she never was one, and that gap between them must occur. It can infantalize. It can hurt. It’s loyal son Tiberius alone on his island, trying to remove himself from power. I think you know these things, and I dont understand why you cant say there are a lot of levels instead of poohing on your own work. A man talks up what he does. You approach this so carefully. It’s difficult for me to watch.

The last several days has seen me writing and watching my mind erase the words because the perspective fragmented as I tried to render the picture. I have had the same problem with drawing. I cant figure out 36’s relation to 28 other than as IC of different forms, the latter being the IC 4 counts of 1 to 64 as branches, and the former being all sorts of things. Example: 6 ‘cubes’ attached to a center cube in which the center is 28, which means 4 sides of 7, compressed f&b to area, so the 6 cubes attach to the faces. But that has a lot of complications, so I dont buy it outright. I have always seen the idea that the 8 difference is the side of the square 64, but that involves a big twisting in which the side adds, so it’s a branching of 28 to 56 plus 8 on either branch (or 4 on both). Cant really say that must be true.

So I go back to exile and observe that it can be read as reaching across the spectrum, from mutual denial and caring about something real to a bagatelle. I can hear it as two people condemned to wander stateless. From replacement to complete misunderstanding of what has been going on.

I’m not enjoying the day. I cant stand up straight.

The best I have now is: 36 conveys the 100 and conveys 3, so the doubling unites with 3’ing or SBE. This means the doubling of 28, on either branch, contains what reaches past it to make the whole into which the 28 fits (or vice versa, I suppose, that 64 splits into 36 and 28 in either directon and that balances). The last part of that sentence came to me in the shower.

It used to be easy: I’d wonder about your motives and I’d question what I was perceiving because you as a woman were completely opaque to me. I’d look at pictures and wonder: what the fuck is in there because that’s not a female wall, not matter how feminine, and I would look and the song would come to mind I enjoy being a girl except it would say I enjoy being a guy being with girls. I’d work through every negative implication and then would throw up my hands and say done with her, except I could never stop giving you chances though half your work seemed to be about not giving second chances because I kept exploring what that meant. Ah, the good old days when I’d imagine you roasting on an open fire, consumed by the flames of my irrational man’s anger, consumed by armageddon.

I only want to be happy, I’d say, and through that constant analysis of the female side of you I straightened things out in my own self. I couldnt do that before you because no person I met was enough. They didnt disappear into the aether. They werent such an exact fit that I had no choice but to explore the differences. I just realized that making me switch hands kept me alive, both by instilling absurd levels of caution, but also by chaining me to the male side of me in an unnatural way. And I mean the sexual references as well. I like to imagine myself as smooth and able to control my knowledge of how girls work, but the reality is more that I would be dead 10 times over at least if I had to live as me. Let me say that again to fully accept it: if I had to live as me, in awareness of my nature, I would have been like my unhappy predecessors trapped in the wrong body making the deals necessary to survive and yeah I see that.

How I miss the certainties of condemnation, the conception of blame, the issues of fault. Now I just pick at things.

Imagine if they could have heard Lover from both sides of the gender hinge. The edge was all from the female perspective. Why? What is your constraint? It honestly feels like a long proof in which each point has to be completed to be accepted.

That again would be 36. I really am trying to find a way of saying this. And if anyone ever looks and wants to know the extent to which you’re literally involved in this work, this is to me a conversation not about you but with you through the oscillations. So I take an attribute and hold that constant and see when a gap arises. As I said, that was easy when I could go through negative implications: rotate to ‘outta here’ but the rotation continues and that branch of exile drops, the same as if it were cut off and died as a piece of a self that was eventually killed off.

I wish I could remember the moments when these occur but they have generally been accompanied by blocks that prevent that. These blocks are the opposite of how you write: they put an abstraction in place at an encompassing level, and that breaks into pieces so the realizations make sense as the summary of and as the attachment to, meaning a tangent point and a perfect usage of attachment theory (meaning the attachment of a bunch of squares over a grid square that processes the functions occuring within the bunch, which is the basis of all attachment theories I guess). It’s impossible to locate an exact tangent point when it represents a flow of information from one area or group or region or field to another. It locates to a square and that square is a Cantor box, and even a shark cant pick up too weak a scent of blood.

Trying again: 36 represents SBE, which is the start to end process, and SBE3 is the representation of a grid square as process. So an IC of process is 36 and that IC of process combines with the IC of existence, which is 28 because that literally counts the branches of existence. So tell me, dear: these combine as grid squares to mate process and existence in a whole, and that means the process of of a whole existence combines to make 100. And that is the nothing I can post that I’ve been working on for days with no success.

And that explains why I keep coming back to conclusions for which the evidence is almost non-existent: they’re implications which fit within the branches I can identify.

I need to say this again because this is clear and simple but it took a ton of work so it has a lot of ephemerality in it: all the way back to the beginning of combining process with existence, which goes back to being 2 years old in a garage thinking about my existence and the process outside the garage in which I was the object of the process, all the way through fCM and SBE, through the detailed rendering of grid squares and the drawings of those relationships as x,y,zK.

And that connects to my oldest drawings of objects crossing over and under each other, meaning the layering of existence combines with the process of determining front and back, which turned out to be crucial conceptions in modeling grid squares.

And that connects to the way I analyze events by setting them within a larger abstraction which passes up and down. So for example, my observation that riots in Portland attached to BLM but are more about resisting upscaling by making Portland less attractive for the upscaling. So there’s an attachment to justification, which is an existence, but this justification processes within a larger abstraction, which is people who resist gentrification of what they consider theirs, including as a conception of ‘Portland’, so the interface with larger society retains an element of justification while actually having other justification.

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