I haven’t been posting here because I’ve been exhausted by my own chaos. Forgive me, I’ve taken on too much. Mostly, I’m checking in. This will be short, and manic.
I want to be honest about the ways in which our lives change, and that mine these days feels like a not-yet-schematized grid.
That mine mind these days feels chaotic. Perhaps this is another iteration of Dionysian consciousness? I truly feel mad. I’d love to poison you with stories of how I’ve been ravaged by intellectual ecstasy — when I felt the slipperiness of language penetrate the labyrinth of sulci floating in cerebrospinal fluid. Unfortunately, I’m thinking about vector psychology — that is, typological psychology, and how I might hallucinate a missing dimension. Don’t ask. I won’t tell.
Diagrammatics enfold ideas, and lately the multiplicitous interaction of grids — their infinite arrival — has acted as a guiding tool for constructing new realities. I can't do anything without thinking about diagrammatics (or theoretical diagrams), putting multiple forms in dialogue. It's almost pathological. Topological? I have to live with it. Remember, and to use a grid metaphor: "Humanity and its products emerge from a mesh of interconnected materials, worlds, and subjects."
I want to talk more about chaos — specifically the basics of chaos control, feedback and non–feedback algorithms for chaos control. I suffer from intrusive thinking.
This post is mostly about weaving, or is it about chaos? Doesn’t matter. I have to include how disenchanted I've become working in an academic art department (I’ll avoid Nietzschean antidotes about the art of tragedy), and how slow craft and my complex relationship to mathematics has not only relivened me, but has also altered my thinking. The direction of my life is changing. For this, I’m grateful.
Chaos magic posits nothing has ultimate truth. Anything remains possible.
Weaving is a form of magic. It is not only an act of discovery that invites multiple readings, it has also cleared my mind of much of the stress that has plagued me for three years, though once the numbers are gone, chaos returns. Amidst the chaos, however, weaving has brought clarity in the avenues I not only want to pursue but need to pursue in the future.
Though I hail from art history, most people know my relationship to the discipline is fraught — that I maintain an obliquity to established disciplines, to fields in general. Any writing I do that may be crudely, perhaps even offensively, categorized as ‘academic’ often cautions against expecting a neat assemblage of methodological boxes to be checked off. I'm dizzy from canonical dehiscence.
Like many of us in higher ed, I'm fucking over it, and am lucky to have found — and continue to search for — other creative ways of support that are available for contingent and independent scholars.
While I tend to stray from labels, I would be a liar if I said I didn't identify as an occultist, my quest is and will never will be complete.
