Passing Summer

Mercifully summer is passing very quickly in our perception here, owed in part to the feverishness of our activity here amidst an eventful year. The average temperatures have been fairly mild this year in the PNW, with lots of rainfall this spring, but the steady attrition of the warming climate - typified by a steady drying-out in the west - has given us a shearing set of impressions in which pockets of surface moisture remain, with slug season being quite long and prolific in the woods this year, while at the same time the streams dry up earlier every year, and the mountain is looking the barest it has ever been at this time of year. 

This drying land loses its capacity to retain water, even as it comes down in torrents in the wet season, and the glaciers don't easily accumulate again after they have melted away, leaving exposed rock darker in color with its own local warming effect. 

At the same time, the deterioration of our political economy has produced a lasting bridge failure, cutting us off from the outside world, which carries with it many contradictory effects, including a protective effect, in which there isn't a steady stream of motor vehicles coming in, producing their sparks and their flammable trash heaps and their undisciplined campfires, among other hazards, so that we may be somewhat insulated from wildfire here, for now, even as dry as the woods have become. 

And the wild, however confused and stressed it may be from the increasingly chaotic climate, becomes more wild itself as the people pressure is lifted, setting free its own inner productive forces and resources. We've seen exploding elk, deer, and bird populations, and the rapid growth of apex predators in conversation with them. And the trailing blackberry (I believe) vines, their toes no longer repeatedly crushed and amputated, discover a newfound imperiousness, and venture out across the abandoned highway. May we live in interesting times. 

This small crop of pieces is all the writing burst I've got for now. It is hot and things are moving and we are very busy, and we will probably remain busy until well into the fall. But I have plenty more coming together and I'll do what I can when I can. 

Memory

Sometimes it can simply be a particular scent, or the chance re-emergence of an old song, or the feeling of a gentle late-summer breeze, or the bubbling up of long-buried images in meditation, which re-awakens old memories that were long since filed away and dormant, bringing back whole worlds to the mind's eye that were temporarily forgotten. 

And that fragility and economizing of energy and focus of human memory betrays the expanse it is built upon and attempts to traverse: that perpetual slipstream of time and space is so vast. So much can happen in seconds, in minutes, in days and months and years. And there is only so much time and energy to witness it. 

Meaning

When you ask the question of "What is this?" or "What does this or that thing mean?" one way to conceptualize that kind of inquiry is to see it as a process of taking in the various streams of experiences, memories, impressions, accepted facts, interests, and even other ideas, and then synthesizing and processing them within oneself, re-assembling them into a new coherent whole, in accordance with one's character and one's knowledge and perceptions. 

To tilt the mirror to the appropriate angle and reveal to you the hall of mirrors within, you could say that this very exercise represents the phenomenon that I'm talking about: my personal re-assembly of the meaning of the concept of meaning, so to speak. 

But there is more to it of course. Individuals don't simply emerge as meaning-assembling and transmitting islands, they emerge out of a spatial and temporal field of matter and energy, in relation to the individuals that birthed and raised and formed them in the context of that field in motion through time. And people typically want to be read and understood in some way, and contribute to their communities and societies, however idiosyncratic and visionary their works are, so that communication is an important part of the process, or a harmonization of existing knowledge bases and languages with that of the novel creation, while "getting it right" so to speak. Meaning relating to being.  

Even the more idiosyncratic weirdos that are perceived as unintelligible to the mainstream, or at least "ahead of their time," are assembling their meaning out of existing languages and concepts that are held in some sort of esteem, however esoteric, and which are favored by the assemblers in question, which can be made out in the novel assemblies, however "new" and "original" they may appear.  

So meaning is not just a fixed thing - though we do endeavor to fix it as such - but a constant flow of moments of production and their artifacts within that which is in existence. 

Impelling Vision

I'm thinking of the energy that is required to build or rebuild the entirety of a legacy construct. What would it take to motivate someone to undertake the difficult and energy-intensive task of building a legacy construct from the ground up, such as a house? One of the simplest examples I can think of, which would contain the necessary motive energy, would be the simple necessity brought about by the destruction of the house. "Necessity is the mother of invention," as the proverb goes. 

Now, there are multiple levels of necessity, which feature lower activation thresholds than total destruction. Necessity can be expressed in simulation exercised in the imagination for example, before the actual material necessity occurs. I'm thinking of a coffee mug placed in a precarious position - perhaps a little too close to the edge of a table - and one glances at it, and is suddenly struck with a pang of concern, coupled with a destructive vision of the mug toppling off of the table and shattering upon the ground. Visions such as these can be informed by knowledge and experience. 

And that vision and the sudden pang of concern can move one to preventative action, using a small amount of energy to get up and slide the mug away from the edge, saving one the energy and distress involved with having the mug fall and shatter, which would bring about a sense of loss, or generate the need to replace it. 

It could be that the mug can remain precariously perched, yet never actually fall off of the table. But going through life with a constant sense of uncertainty and precarity can be quite stressful, and so such distressing visions and their compensatory actions can actually smooth out the trajectory of one's life, simulating various states of destruction in the imagination while guiding one through various preventative and constructive processes in service to the vision, staving off the eventual material destruction and distress. 

The higher the stakes involved, the more spectacular and urgent these visions, which can influence how powerful and totalizing they can be as motivating forces. There are also positive visions of desire and reward, which can contain powerful motivating impulses as well. One desires a dream house for example, and imagines the many blissful possibilities contained in its promise, and so one is fulfilled with the motivation to undertake its construction. 

Questions arise though: what are the intentions and effects of these visions? The compensatory actions of these visions are only as good as the abilities and resources of those entertaining them and putting them to work. How to account for a society that is completely awash in visions of destruction and desire, which are produced in response to real cultural and political-economic phenomena, but which are promptly packaged up and sold back to its denizens, the matter concluded, with nothing of substance actually done to address the vision? What is a society to do that is choking on its own multiplying complexity, as its chaotic productive and destructive forces unfold unaddressed, however much is dreamt and spoken about them?  

Sensational and spectacular disaster movies can circulate in the theaters, with incredible amounts of time and energy put into rendering their visions of destruction, down to the minutest graphical details such as beautifully simulated collapsing skyscrapers and titanic floods and raging infernos, creating positively sublime spectacles to behold. And look: if we don't get a handle on this climate issue, or this geopolitical issue, or whatever else, this little smooshed bug on the big-screen could be you! 

This tendency even extends to real material destruction. The mainstream news media cozies up to you with images of real material distress: "Look...look at this stressful thing, pretty stressful right?" Mostly to get a rise out of you and to nudge you into some type of commercial action, without any kind of intention of addressing the underlying dynamic. 

I'll admit though that this is a highly slanted account that isn't entirely fair; it is only a slice of an image born out of a particular nadir in Western history. There was a time when Western cultural products and news media effected a stronger feedback signal within the body politic itself, leading to broader changes (or edifications) in collective action, depending on the antagonistic (or supportive) nature of a particular message. But that faculty seems to have weakened over time, alongside everything else. 

Though that doesn't necessarily mean a loss of feedback and action altogether; more appropriately, there seems to be a steady inversion of the signal-to-noise ratio, and a dispersal and incoherence of corrective action. Indeed, for every wave of collective listlessness and paralysis, you get accompanying spasms of thrashing and sound and fury in every direction, a complete discharging of the available batteries of conventional thought and action, which only accelerates and deepens the confusion and impotence. Much like one becoming bogged down in mud, spinning one's wheels in a panic, forming and deepening the ruts that were formed by the bogging down in turn.     

So you get this preposterous situation in which fearful imagery is constantly circulating, with the assorted feverish apocalyptic visions continuously accumulating as everything continues to get worse at once, shorn of the collective faculty of mitigation. Within such a society, you get this strange admixture of a visceral and accelerating dynamism, and an excruciating sense of stasis and stagnation. A society increasingly cannibalizing itself and doing violence to itself, while in an increasing state of imaginative distress, feeding paranoia and conspiracy theory, the confusion and impotence of which feeds into the self-cannibalization and self-destruction. 

A fearsome business! But I'll leave with a tantalizing message of possibility, that there are still eddies where those destructive visions give way to positive visions of hope and desire, where better living is still possible, which may very well seed tenacious shoots glimpsing light through the growing cracks.