How Does One Enjoy Occupying Outer Space? (I’m asking the universe.)
[What's the ugliest part of your body?
What's the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose some say your toes
I think it's your mind (Your mind)
I think it's your mind, woo woo]
***
A / E7 / G / D
Occupy outer space
if i go it'll be okay
occupy outer space
and if i go it'll be okay
occupy outer space
i might go and lose my mind today
occupy outer space
hmm
Well.
I wrote a lot of ugly shit (most of which I have omitted from here so that I might be less of a menance on this earthly plane), considered 33,000 different ideas, and ultimately came upon the one I am now presenting, or not-presenting, upon this humble, humble, HTML page.
I remixed our song! Went all the way back forward to 3321, and made some sort of artefact. You found an old half-broken 'radio'—turns out it's playing eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee's track, all the way from 2521!
Folk-ambient? I used an Irish flute in it I got last semester from the Music Inn because I was taking a class in the Irish department, called an Introduction to Celtic Music. I played very stupidly—this will make sense after reading below, if you'd like. The beginning sample is from What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body? I feels like it says everything.
Remember when the theme song song kept autoplaying? That was fucking hilarious, the way those pipes feel crazier and crazier the more times you play it. Like they don't even ask, they just come in. I wanted to nod to that.
I’ll spare you the details (which will turn out to be a lie), because the premise is that there are So Many Details—no wonder we’re all going nuts!
I checked my photos from exactly a year ago. It reminded me that this was just around the time I began to truly lose it, alone in quarantine, last year. And what a ride it’s been! I’m certainly not the same person, or, perhaps, I’m more of a person than ever because I’ve given up! I’ve given up! I’m sick of it all, and I’ve given up. That is why I am in this sincerity tip right
now, because if I spew out any more farce I am going to collapse inwards on myself and become a black hole, or something, or worse, if that exists.
The other day I was looking at all the possibilities we know a dying star to have. Turns out, a black hole is but one of them! Houston we might not have a problem! I just might have a choice!
During my morning meditation I got the impulse to go somewhere in my apartment and grab something—this, I knew, was a lifeline lead for ideas for this final project. So I got up from my chair, eyes still closed, and just followed where I felt like I was supposed to go. I ended up crawling, eyes still closed, to an oft-neglected corner of my living room and landed on a book in my magazine rack. After opened my eyes, I was looking at a book haven’t opened for years—Miles’ Diary, The Life of Miles Davis 1947-1961, by Ken Vail. I brought it to my desk and opened it randomly. The first page I opened to:
Okay. Right, of course—it has to be about love. I feel like that’s inherent, though? So I knew that was but a cheeky reminder from
the Universe about what’s really going on here. Thanks.
During my journey eyes-shut, I also grabbed an old copy of apartmento. I landed on these pages depicting a few sculpture structures—WIRES.
I liked this because it reminded me of something I wrote in my final for my class that ended a few weeks ago on Sufism. Part of the final was to talk about our own understanding of ourselves, and I talked about how my current realization is that I’m actually trying to be on this planet with the thinnest skin possible. Everyone talks about thick skin. They always say that about New York. But I realized I’m trying to be here with the thinnest skin possible—living life as live wire. I came into being on the stupid, splendid island, and maybe I'll be able to do it again. So that’s why these pages were another breadcrumb from outer space.
An architect a few pages later:
Did living in a tent for three years before you built the house influence the design?
Peter Stutchbury: It just teaches you not to need too much. You learn you don’t need a solid frame; protection is symbolic.
For some of my BRAINSTORM (01100010 01110010 01100001 01101001 01101110 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01101101 00001010), I was thinking about how to play with the idea of /outer space/, like as The Space Outside Ourselves (Or That We Often Presume Is Outside is Ourselves), and started thinking about comfort, home, safety. My apartment as outer space. The space between subatomic particles. My body, even. Something from the Dao De Jing I’ve always held dear: it is the space that creates the vessel—the space, that creates a room. We often look at walls and partitions. But it’s really the space—so cunningly invisible-seen.
Play what’s not there, said Davis. It’s how you join the note that came before, in the present moment, that does it.
As you can see from my notebook, I was having trouble settling on a focus. Luckily, I’m getting better and better at understanding what’s going on when that begins to happen, what's really going on when I start to get overwhelmed and uncomfortable and my inside walls begin to feel like steel wool rubbing against one another.
LIFE IS HEAT—friction. It is in the perfect balance between this and that and can cause a certain kind of reaction. In my crystallography studies, we were looking at how the speed of cooling affects crystallization. Slow cooling is paramount. To create that strong, perfect structure you need the kiss of sweet sweet time. That’s so exquisite to me. I talked about that in my Sufi paper.
Anyway, so I felt that discomfort—all that bullshit: I want to do well with this and do well with this class and I feel like I’ve done a bad job occupying outer space in some places and there’s a part of me that wants to use the the fact that I almost passed away as excuse for not doing everything the way my most exalted self would do it but the crux of the matter is that I don’t think that’s the answer either: it really doesn’t matter. Wanting to justify my lack of perfection IS the issue at hand, not the perceived lack. As Miles said so cogently with his perfect trumpet-timbre: So What.
ANYWAY, I think I semi-promised to explain how I fixed my feeling bad. I needed to stop trying so hard. That is my deepest wound. It’s that working hard thing. I have sometimes had an abusive relationship with hard work where it uses an invariable-rate feedback schedule to make me an addict, and so, naturally, upon finding something even psychically harder than that—letting go—I was hooked. So I just laid in bed and told the Universe and all that Outer Space that this is your project now. Figure out my final project for Ithai’s class, thanks.
If you told me this a few years ago, I would’ve been terrified. In fact, I’m not sure she and I now would be really able to have a conversation at all. She knelt by the altar of hard work, pressing into pain ad infinitum, and, maybe worst of all, often felt righteous about it. Me on a few years about me now: hello, and what am I doing wrong now, do you think?
Anyway, I laid in bed and laughed out loud after facetiously telling the whole Universe that I’m delegating, that I’m going to have them all figure out this thing for me. (But on a non-facetious, real aside: this is my currently understanding of having faith.)
At this point, the only thing I had for the final was a single rule: Fun. Not to Have Fun, because then I’m forcing it (“when there’s a push, the lightness of it goes” Joan Erikson once said in an interview), but just pure fun. We ask our very younger people much more often did you have fun?
Why did we ever stop?
I know I want to work hard on something, but that kind of work where it’s sublime, deep, joyous toil. That’s my only rule. No ulterior motives other than enjoying the hell out of this.
A couple minutes later I suddenly remembered that gorgeous piece Free Play, by Stephen Nachmanovitch, which was brought up as an optional reading in my Play & Creativity class I took a while back, which was taught by a neuroscientist in the CAMS department, which rocks, by the way.
So I leave us with this, because that’s all there really is to it.
So here’s the final premise: I’m giving up, drifting out in my little tent in outer space, forever and ever and ever, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. And here’s my decision: I’m going to have it rock my socks off. And I’m going to make a bunch of things that explore that idea, that adventures how to go about enjoying occupying outer space.
Back to my meditation-crawl: Universe wants me to know it’s something about love. “It was like magic, almost like I had been hypnotized.” I’ve been ruminating on unconditional love, and that idea of what it really is, ACTUALLY unconditional. No matter how awfully the proverbial winds of space feel like they are trying to tear apart my neutrinos, the love is unconditional, and I must just have faith that it will all unfold.
How Does One Enjoy Occupying Outer Space? (I’m asking the universe.)
<—— <———
Okay. Right, of course—it has to be about love. I feel like that’s inherent, though? So I knew that was but a cheeky reminder from
the Universe about what’s really going on here. Thanks.
During my journey eyes-shut, I also grabbed an old copy of apartmento. I landed on these pages depicting a few sculpture structures—WIRES.
I liked this because it reminded me of something I wrote in my final for my class that ended a few weeks ago on Sufism. Part of the final was to talk about our own understanding of ourselves, and I talked about how my current realization is that I’m actually trying to be on this planet with the thinnest skin possible. Everyone talks about thick skin. They always say that about New York. But I realized I’m trying to be here with the thinnest skin possible—living life as live wire. I came into being on the stupid, splendid island, and maybe I'll be able to do it again. So that’s why these pages were another breadcrumb from outer space.
An architect a few pages later:
Did living in a tent for three years before you built the house influence the design?
Peter Stutchbury: It just teaches you not to need too much. You learn you don’t need a solid frame; protection is symbolic.
For some of my BRAINSTORM (01100010 01110010 01100001 01101001 01101110 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01101101 00001010), I was thinking about how to play with the idea of /outer space/, like as The Space Outside Ourselves (Or That We Often Presume Is Outside is Ourselves), and started thinking about comfort, home, safety. My apartment as outer space. The space between subatomic particles. My body, even. Something from the Dao De Jing I’ve always held dear: it is the space that creates the vessel—the space, that creates a room. We often look at walls and partitions. But it’s really the space—so cunningly invisible-seen.
Play what’s not there, said Davis. It’s how you join the note that came before, in the present moment, that does it.
As you can see from my notebook, I was having trouble settling on a focus. Luckily, I’m getting better and better at understanding what’s going on when that begins to happen, what's really going on when I start to get overwhelmed and uncomfortable and my inside walls begin to feel like steel wool rubbing against one another.
LIFE IS HEAT—friction. It is in the perfect balance between this and that and can cause a certain kind of reaction. In my crystallography studies, we were looking at how the speed of cooling affects crystallization. Slow cooling is paramount. To create that strong, perfect structure you need the kiss of sweet sweet time. That’s so exquisite to me. I talked about that in my Sufi paper.
Anyway, so I felt that discomfort—all that bullshit: I want to do well with this and do well with this class and I feel like I’ve done a bad job occupying outer space in some places and there’s a part of me that wants to use the the fact that I almost passed away as excuse for not doing everything the way my most exalted self would do it but the crux of the matter is that I don’t think that’s the answer either: it really doesn’t matter. Wanting to justify my lack of perfection IS the issue at hand, not the perceived lack. As Miles said so cogently with his perfect trumpet-timbre: So What.
ANYWAY, I think I semi-promised to explain how I fixed my feeling bad. I needed to stop trying so hard. That is my deepest wound. It’s that working hard thing. I have sometimes had an abusive relationship with hard work where it uses an invariable-rate feedback schedule to make me an addict, and so, naturally, upon finding something even psychically harder than that—letting go—I was hooked. So I just laid in bed and told the Universe and all that Outer Space that this is your project now. Figure out my final project for Ithai’s class, thanks.
If you told me this a few years ago, I would’ve been terrified. In fact, I’m not sure she and I now would be really able to have a conversation at all. She knelt by the altar of hard work, pressing into pain ad infinitum, and, maybe worst of all, often felt righteous about it. Me on a few years about me now: hello, and what am I doing wrong now, do you think?
Anyway, I laid in bed and laughed out loud after facetiously telling the whole Universe that I’m delegating, that I’m going to have them all figure out this thing for me. (But on a non-facetious, real aside: this is my currently understanding of having faith.)
At this point, the only thing I had for the final was a single rule: Fun. Not to Have Fun, because then I’m forcing it (“when there’s a push, the lightness of it goes” Joan Erikson once said in an interview), but just pure fun. We ask our very younger people much more often did you have fun?
Why did we ever stop?
I know I want to work hard on something, but that kind of work where it’s sublime, deep, joyous toil. That’s my only rule. No ulterior motives other than enjoying the hell out of this.
A couple minutes later I suddenly remembered that gorgeous piece Free Play, by Stephen Nachmanovitch, which was brought up as an optional reading in my Play & Creativity class I took a while back, which was taught by a neuroscientist in the CAMS department, which rocks, by the way.
So I leave us with this, because that’s all there really is to it.
So here’s the final premise: I’m giving up, drifting out in my little tent in outer space, forever and ever and ever, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. And here’s my decision: I’m going to have it rock my socks off. And I’m going to make a bunch of things that explore that idea, that adventures how to go about enjoying occupying outer space.
Back to my meditation-crawl: Universe wants me to know it’s something about love. “It was like magic, almost like I had been hypnotized.” I’ve been ruminating on unconditional love, and that idea of what it really is, ACTUALLY unconditional. No matter how awfully the proverbial winds of space feel like they are trying to tear apart my neutrinos, the love is unconditional, and I must just have faith that it will all unfold.
How Does One Enjoy Occupying Outer Space? (I’m asking the universe.)
<——
<———