{ 2004.04.23 } The cream blinds against the windows against the white walls of my new bedroom. The bright morning sun projects an image of the east-facing window sharp onto the blind: condensation patterns, each droplet a halo, rough edges of the frames where I wasn't neat with the gloss, an xray edge-filtered. The south-facing window is more diffuse. A subtle shadow grid intersecting blurred rectangles. A milky Rothko.

{ 04.19 } Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch is being performed in San Francisco, in its entirety. If you're a local, and free for 24 hours or so following 10pm next Friday (23 April), then go. Beethoven's 9th symphony timestretched to 24 hours. Each movement lasts about 5 hours. 2 minute crescendos now build over 20 minutes. It's slow. The performance is a sleepover.

I listened to the first four movements on my train ride from New York to San Diego (for Etcon, this year). My power ran out, but I'd listened to the 5th before. Over that length of time, you can't pay attention. The music affects your consciousness without you noticing, shapes your thoughts. It's impossible to pinpoint anything about the sound itself, only your own cognitive state. I made notes immediately afterwards. For a nearly a day's worth of listening, this is all I could muster, summarising each 5 hours chunk in a sentence:

1st movement is excellent, near the beginning, very exciting. End of the 2nd movement is scratchy. Not so keen on the 3rd. It seems quiet. The 4th is dark to begin with, then sad. I've heard the 5th before, but not this trip. I remember it being vocal and dramatic, especially at the beginning and in the middle.

(But I remember, within it, there were long portions where I was rapt, carried by the music, and even five minute transitions that were especially touching (that I'm not actually sure I could hear, now, outside the context of the movement).) And then:

9 Beet Stretch, like this long train ride, isn't a spectacle to be taken in and anticipated, but rather a smell: a field of potential to be used as extelligence, to be lived, the journey being the destination.

You can listen to 9 Beet Stretch yourself, in streamed Real, or download it as mp3s.

(More background and quotes from Inge at the New York Times: Beethoven's Ninth Around the Clock, What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones; a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche, and the trance state induced by listening.)

{ 04.18 } (Packing yesterday. Moving house. Objects going into cardboard boxes, boxes stacking on top of boxes. Packing isn't random. Objects have shapes, and some things aren't really objects: knowing that I need to pack my jumpers together means they comprise a population. They'll stick together if they can, but will be split up if necessary (it doesn't matter that they're together that much). They afford padding delicate things, or wrapping multiplicities together. As do small cardboard boxes, which are used to keep the aromatic oils from rolling around, but which can also be put in other boxes. Lamps ask to be wrapped in tshirts, and ask so hard that they're as inseparable as a pair of shoes (you could separate them, you'd be a fool to). Ornaments ask to be separated by clothes too but because they're smaller, all separated yet in the same box (you wouldn't want to find one by surprise and break it). A box's shape asks for a book in the certain size range, the actual book resonating and asking for more books of the same size. Size matters, subject matters. The shape of the free space changes, the ideal book to fill the hole changes, and the aggregate weight acts as a stop. Bulk properties lead to heavy boxes, fragile boxes, those without lids, those that can be turned, and filling the van we play the same packing game again: each packed object influencing the space and the shape and what can be put in top.

These are local relations, and then (at the van level) more, emergent, local relations (abstracted by the cardboard). As solid as the surface of each thing is, its objecthood bleeds out into proximate neighbours, a three dimensional jigsaw of affordance niches, all filled. I can no longer refer to the table lamp, it's the table lamp shirt box-with-wooden-game more shirts not-heavy assemblage. The reality of packing has forced me to stop thinking of units, not even to regard the mass of my belongings as an association network (what does it matter that my clothes are in this box and that other box? It's obvious when I look at them), what matters is the immediacy of packing/unpacking, the local actuality of the so-far packed population: it's an extremely dense local-link network, and as Steve Grand (talking) referred to the brain: not a network of modules and circuits (objects) but more like a gel, the kind of medium in which broad phenomena can occur, fields, waves.

And indeed that's what happened (what's happening), unpacking. Before moving, the order of unpacking would have been the reverse but otherwise identical to the order of the packing. But the new house has provided a new ecology of niches, in new positions. In their new configuration, in the new environment, the boxes are held in tension between these two surfaces: the packing order encouraged by the shelves, layout of the old place; the packing order encouraged by the new.

Set like this, it becomes inevitable. The objecthood smeared out across the packed gel produces interference patterns, waves. Each box acts as a cavity, bouncing the ripples back and forth, amplifying, and out of the grey primordial packedness forming (objectifying) things, objects, belongings once again. The constellation of boxes likewise, the properties (on top, behind, can't reach, teetering stack) form circuits, switching gates: they act as channels, opportunity-to-release-objects rushes, converges, highlights single items: unpacking is easy, it's a matter of listening to the packed. Like the carpenter who sands with the grain (there's no rule that says you have to, you can sand against the grain, it'll just look terrible), we know what we have to do.

The packed becoming unpacked. It speaks to us. The affordance-gel serialising into a steam of newly minted objects, freshly abstracted and given independent surfaces, emitted one by one like puffs of steam from this opportunity machine. As it unfolds, this ribbon encodes the intelligence of the assemblage, like a computer chip that does nothing static but collapses dynamically into work.

It's just a matter of reading it. By reading the collapsed string, we can see, like a hologram, the layout of the old house and the belongings arranged in it: we can reconstruct the mindstuff of the packedness, and the thought-processes that occupy it, the same thought-processes that are/were isomorphic with the configuration changes inherant in the unpacking, our hands as the mechanism of its thinking. And we can read it. Mind reading.

The first object to be reformed/regurgitated was my camera. As there are four unpopulated rooms, take the fourth letter "e". Books I need to consult come next, and those went on existing bookshelves in the house, so fourth letter again. "K."

The dresser and bedside table arrived at this point, from outside, which changed the shape and occupied the bedroom, and so altered the field defining the [static, it's only really thinking-conscious while dynamic, being disassembled] conscious state of the packedness. So for the next item (statements, in boxfiles), take the third letter, "a".

Third letter also from hammer ("m") which we used to repair the moved bookshelves. A remarkably introspective thought, given the outward-facing nature of previous steps of unpacking.

"Ekam."

Which appears to be Sanskrit, part of a mantra, meaning one, without a second. Where a second cannot even be contemplated, not even a virtual second, like "the number 4" I guess, or the isness. (And unlike the Earth, because a twin Earth can at least virtually exist.)

Crikey.

I must say, I didn't expect the process of unpacking several hours worth of belongings to be speaking to me in Vedic Sanskrit, much less to be reminding me to regard the matter in my hands and in my house (and the happenings, and becomings) as part of a single - and all-encompasing - isness, just as simultaneously (and in contradiction) the packedness is dissolving its haecceity [deferred] into a linear stream of freshly manufactured objects, condensed out of the gel, objects that display the very opposite of ekam. Well, I guess that's why it needs to be restated, and anyway it's good to be told.

Ekam, backwards, is "make." Which is presumed to be significant.)