Thank you for introducing me to the word "ambedo" — "a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela."
Hello again, Jonathan. I meant to respond immediately upon reading your post earlier in the week but was busily pursuing my own selfish interests and in the middle of something quite captivating. Your post immediately brought to mind something I read from one of my go-to thinkers, West Coast poet and Buddhist Gary Snyder. Today, I pulled up the reference in "Practice of the Wild," where Snyder tells of a Crow elder who had something important to say at a mid-seventies Native American conference in Bozeman, Mont. The elder encouraged those in attendance to set their roots in a place and listen for spiritual messages from the land, the winds and waters. He said something to the effect of "If people stay somewhere long enough -- even white people -- the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren't lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them." It is apparent to me that you've already made such an intimate connection to your place on Champlain's shores. Please do continue listening and probing and sharing what you learn. This insane world can't get enough.
Thank you, Gary. Your comment reminds me of a quote I once came across, which I believe is attributed to Wendell Berry — something like: "The right way of owning land is to allow the land to own you." It's a notion that I grapple with: feeling committed to a place, while also feeling the pull of exploration and adventure in other places, a coming and a going, a drinking in and then a distilling. As they say: everywhere you go, there you are.
Yes wonderful really. Doesn’t this intention of unity permeate everything?
From our ways of seeing, to the way sound and light travels and the way the white veins in the limestone become eventually grey sand in the great recycler of time. The transformative factor is key to unity. The only constant is change. Yet when we change the magnitude of our point of view over the elements, regardless how far away or close by we look at them, there is a stillness untouched as an inherent organic position, a place for everything and everyone, a place for each grain of sand interconnecting with the next one, as a whole. There is peace within that stillness,(just like the one I imagine of a swirling Dervish in constant movement), just like a floating universe balancing chaos, gravitational forces and the supreme dance. Off I go... Thank you dear Jonathan. Wonderful to witness your life, work and thoughts again. 🙏
Yes, I resonate very much with this perspective — and plan to explore it more fully in a future commentary on Equidistant (https://infragments.us/equidistant), which is largely about this way of perceiving.
I’ve watched all the films in one go when you launched the project. I’m reading the updates every week and I’m thinking to watch films again to reflect on your writings and so on. Do you recommend a pathway? But the way someone, anyone can navigate through the forms, creates a new landscape, a topography of a world of ideas perhaps?
To observe the patterns of activity between the forms creates a new landscape. Like the correspondence between the elements you designed is like bloodstream through a nervous network system. the stills, the experimental performance and videos, the writings, drawings ...) are a landmark topography that changes routines, that is navigated in different ways by different people according to their needs. These contrails that each one creates with our way and movement of choices, the way we view the surrounding environment and the way we go about fitting within it, thats another ghost of a project if you know what I mean.
I’m blabbing again but these dimensions perhaps should be acknowledged in your work. There are many dimensions interlinked in your work when viewed organically from a distance as a whole. It becomes a topography of testimonies of intention.
The matter recycled In tiny mirroring points at the bottom of a lake perhaps? But is celebrating the mud somehow around us and many moons later the mud behind us. Is our point of view analogue movement navigating through your lands? And if so, what’s organic? (Thanks for the space & time again Jonathan 🙏 ).
I love your notion of "the ghost of the project" — yes, I know what you mean, those trails of exploration. My personal sense is that the best approach is to watch the full set of films in sequence in a single sitting (i.e. through a screening: https://infragments.us/screening), and only then to explore the supporting information through the website, with the weekly commentaries perhaps serving as doorways or invitations back into certain neighborhoods.
Thank you, Jonathan. I have really liked having these weekly moments of quiet ambedo with you. Hope you are well. Lisa
Thank you for introducing me to the word "ambedo" — "a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela."
Hello again, Jonathan. I meant to respond immediately upon reading your post earlier in the week but was busily pursuing my own selfish interests and in the middle of something quite captivating. Your post immediately brought to mind something I read from one of my go-to thinkers, West Coast poet and Buddhist Gary Snyder. Today, I pulled up the reference in "Practice of the Wild," where Snyder tells of a Crow elder who had something important to say at a mid-seventies Native American conference in Bozeman, Mont. The elder encouraged those in attendance to set their roots in a place and listen for spiritual messages from the land, the winds and waters. He said something to the effect of "If people stay somewhere long enough -- even white people -- the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren't lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them." It is apparent to me that you've already made such an intimate connection to your place on Champlain's shores. Please do continue listening and probing and sharing what you learn. This insane world can't get enough.
Thank you, Gary. Your comment reminds me of a quote I once came across, which I believe is attributed to Wendell Berry — something like: "The right way of owning land is to allow the land to own you." It's a notion that I grapple with: feeling committed to a place, while also feeling the pull of exploration and adventure in other places, a coming and a going, a drinking in and then a distilling. As they say: everywhere you go, there you are.
Yes wonderful really. Doesn’t this intention of unity permeate everything?
From our ways of seeing, to the way sound and light travels and the way the white veins in the limestone become eventually grey sand in the great recycler of time. The transformative factor is key to unity. The only constant is change. Yet when we change the magnitude of our point of view over the elements, regardless how far away or close by we look at them, there is a stillness untouched as an inherent organic position, a place for everything and everyone, a place for each grain of sand interconnecting with the next one, as a whole. There is peace within that stillness,(just like the one I imagine of a swirling Dervish in constant movement), just like a floating universe balancing chaos, gravitational forces and the supreme dance. Off I go... Thank you dear Jonathan. Wonderful to witness your life, work and thoughts again. 🙏
Yes, I resonate very much with this perspective — and plan to explore it more fully in a future commentary on Equidistant (https://infragments.us/equidistant), which is largely about this way of perceiving.
I’ve watched all the films in one go when you launched the project. I’m reading the updates every week and I’m thinking to watch films again to reflect on your writings and so on. Do you recommend a pathway? But the way someone, anyone can navigate through the forms, creates a new landscape, a topography of a world of ideas perhaps?
To observe the patterns of activity between the forms creates a new landscape. Like the correspondence between the elements you designed is like bloodstream through a nervous network system. the stills, the experimental performance and videos, the writings, drawings ...) are a landmark topography that changes routines, that is navigated in different ways by different people according to their needs. These contrails that each one creates with our way and movement of choices, the way we view the surrounding environment and the way we go about fitting within it, thats another ghost of a project if you know what I mean.
I’m blabbing again but these dimensions perhaps should be acknowledged in your work. There are many dimensions interlinked in your work when viewed organically from a distance as a whole. It becomes a topography of testimonies of intention.
The matter recycled In tiny mirroring points at the bottom of a lake perhaps? But is celebrating the mud somehow around us and many moons later the mud behind us. Is our point of view analogue movement navigating through your lands? And if so, what’s organic? (Thanks for the space & time again Jonathan 🙏 ).
I love your notion of "the ghost of the project" — yes, I know what you mean, those trails of exploration. My personal sense is that the best approach is to watch the full set of films in sequence in a single sitting (i.e. through a screening: https://infragments.us/screening), and only then to explore the supporting information through the website, with the weekly commentaries perhaps serving as doorways or invitations back into certain neighborhoods.
good morning - thank you for the email... so many rich thoughts - a nice way to reframe my day.
Thank you, Judy.
And yet a point has no length.-
z-transform
Mysterious, isn't it?
Inspirational