A Tarot Reading

I performed my first Tarot reading with a Rider-Waite Tarot deck. Spread method: Celtic Cross. Question asked: What is the meaning of Part I of my blog?

SIGNIFICATOR CARD: KNIGHT OF CUPS

In order to arrive at my Significator card, I used a method that used both choice and chance. I split the deck into four piles. I placed my hand over every pile, trying to sense an energy or drawnness to that particular pile. After feeling drawn to a particular deck, I went through it, consulted it. I chose the card that I felt best represented my persona (or EPS): the Knight of Cups. A few notes on the Knight of Cups: the most feminine of the knights, though still a knight; well-mannered, though manipulative (though their is a certain logic and reason to his manipulation and, as such, has an aptitude for "reading people"); keeps private self to himself; sends mixed messages; can be charming, though duplicitous. In short, the Knight of Cups is an intense personification of whirl-pool neurosis. 

CARD THAT FELL OUT OF DECK WHILE SHUFFLING: 4 of SWORDS

I sided with methods that encourage one to put aside a card that falls out of the deck while shuffling. This element of fault/chance/accident should be taken into strong consideration with the reading at large. A few brief notes about this card: clarity; calm; a period of peace. In short, STOP WORRYING!

MY SPREAD

1. PRESENT: QUEEN OF PENTACLES. General notes: dark woman; presents from a rich relative; rich and happy marriage

2. IMMEDIATE CHALLENGE: THE HIGH PRIESTESS. General notes: veiled in mystery; pure potentiality; unconscious; intuition; shadow

3. DISTANT PAST: WHEEL OF FORTUNE. General notes: luck; success; everything connected in cycle; destiny; change to have happened

4. RECENT PAST: KING OF PENTACLES. General notes: stability; golden touch; all business; old methods of thinking

5. IMMEDIATE FUTURE: THE TOWER. General notes: dated beliefs; adversity; distress; misery

6. BEST OUTCOME: 2 of WANDS. General notes: directing energy (will); will to self/power; friendship

7. FACTORS AFFECTING SITUATION: TEMPERANCE. General notes: economy; moderation; management; incorporate fears affectively; need for balance

8. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES: JUSTICE. General notes: equity; rightness; probity; two fundamental laws: 1. cause and effect and, 2. karma; the past informs the future

9. HOPES AND FEARS: 8 of CUPS. General notes: stagnant swamp; wake-up call; lack of motivation; barren wasteland; wisdom in void

10. FINAL OUTCOME: THE SUN. General notes: light and life; reliability; contentment; illumination. 

GENERAL READING

I am going to start my reading by focusing on two cards that are often read as a coupling: the 5 card (Immediate Future) and the 10 card (Final Outcome). Both of these cards were major arcana cards, and they starkly contrasted each other--though in the more desired direction. The Tower seems to gesture towards the undergoing called for and experienced during Part I of my blog: revisiting past and having a present rupture, expressed by and through a reflection on past living environments and an internal mediation of my present living environment (in all sense and senses: state of mind and attitude [Einstellung], visual percepts, sound, etc). The Tower is familiar, but the Tower must be laid to waste (because it is so familiar). Of course, it is not easy to voluntarily head into the Valley of the Uncanny. This is why one is often thrown from the Tower (re-thrownness), as it burns and collapses into rubble. The positive of this is new creation ("new dreams, new dreams; there is no truth" as my Motto from Yeats reads); it is, in other words, The Sun. Of course, this does not merely happen in a linear fashion, as the meaning of some of the other cards in my spread demonstrate. Both the Wheel of Fortune (Distant Past) and Justice (External Influences) gesture towards the manner in which the past informs the future, the necessity of both cause and effect and karma, destiny and connectedness. I think the aesthetic undergoing in Part I of my blog, and my negotiation with limit, Daimon, and Nemesis, brings forth the understanding of EPS as Moment that is not here or there, but crystallized into a persona that constantly and recursively undergoing in connection and various of flight (see: D&G's Rhizome as my Emblem in Part I). I find the Present (Queen of Pentacles) and the Immediate Challenge (High Priestess) to also be very interesting draws: both are, to differing degrees, dark women. My present happiness with my blog presents (immediately) the next challenge: to focus on how to take these still somewhat unconscious drives, these pure potentialities (potente), that I have approached in Part I and move them more fully from the shadows and into the light (to be connected to my Final Outcome, The Sun). Of course, Factors Affecting the Situation (and such a move or turn) is Temperance (see: Allegory of Prudence in general)--and this must not be forgotten along the way. The Hopes and Fears card made me giggle, to be honest, because it seems to have the most direct (re)presentation of the disaster at hand: stagnant swamp. However, the hope of the card rests in the ability to draw wisdom from the void (the (w)hole). We should also note the Best Outcome, which is an effective directing of energy towards will and self-empowerment, or towards what I would consider "well-being." 

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Digital Virality: Water Toxicity

Modeling after Smithson (analogy): (re)mapping the accident/chance. The Harlem Shake got millions and millions dancing, creating; perhaps the Cabot Koppers Shake will get the people of Gainesville dancing to a different rhythm. A more fluid rhythm. Chance, especially as articulated in the Cabot Koppers superfund site, often demands an urgency. We can learn to use chance to help us better see/understand a given disaster (example: the language of Tarot) via an aesthetic undergoing. High concentrations of dixoin are present in Cabot Koppers; dixoin causes various physical deformities, organ damage, cancers, etc. But a different way of siting/sighting dixoin poisoning: the strategy of the viral meme.

A Metaphysics of Sight: Mapping the (In)Visible

The most enjoyable part of Robert Smithson's approach to art for me (whether it be structures, maps, diagrams, etc.) was its attempt to redirect vision towards "blind spots," making the otherwise invisible visible again. Smithson's consideration of vision as not simply a retinal operation always already apprehending the truth of a sight/site, but rather as a stratification (a learned way of seeing via cultural (re)production) that sees accordingly, lends itself to our project rather poignantly. As Smithson would change sight by changing a site (and vice versa), perhaps our project should look towards strategies that induce an aesthetic undergoing that makes visible the Cabot Koppers Superfund site in a way that actually urges (urgently) a re-cognition of the site in the service of well-being (a return to goodness, joy, fulfillment of capacities). Indeed, our job, it seems, is not to tell people what to do about their community; rather, by shifting the manner in which they are able to see their community and themselves within it (the knot of desire in which one's personal singularity is linked to the plurality), we can render otherwise blind spots visible.

So the question remains: How can we approach Smithson’s artistic methods of mapping and re-mapping, of presenting and re-presenting sites/non-sites in a manner that is conducive with ubicomp/ubimage, fits our disciplinary expertise, and that can effectively bring forth and make visual (and urgent) the “accident” of Cabot Koppers SuperFund (in the service of general well-being)? Certainly, the answer is an endless multiple (in application), so long as we hone in on effectively appropriating the general strategy. After all, lest we forget, Smithson was brought in to work on the Dallas Fort Worth Airport Terminal as an “artist-consultant” (133). How can we Konsult in a manner that appropriates some of Smithson’s strategies, while remaining focused on our own particular strengths (since we are not engineers, artists, programmers, etc.)? 

One experiment or possible application is posted below. 

This is Smithson's "Earthmap of Gondwanaland Ice Cap." Here he makes a connection between two seemingly disparate sites, for the service of rethinking and shifting sight (I argue, or at least I argue that one could argue). 

This is a similar strategy/operation, linking the mapping of electricity poles (see: pine tar; one distinct site) to the Cabot Koppers Superfund site. Such a strategy might be useful for our project. For example, Reynolds notes: “When Smithson began working with TAMS, he wanted to make work that would accommodate and reveal the visual conditions of the air terminal as a working facility, and he also wanted to make art that would speak about the invisible materials and processes that helped to bring the terminal into existence as a visual form” (139). 

Within the institution of the internet/digitality, there is also the map meme, or the mapeme:

Considering Smithson, tourism, and the effective logic of advertisements, we might also consider his abandoned attempt at inserting a conceptual tour guide performance into his Passaic project, as noted in Reynolds: “Smithson appoints himself an ‘official’ guide to Passaic and its monuments in an advertisement he designed to accompany the publication of his Passaic article. Its proposed text reads as follows: SEE THE MONUMENT OF PASSAIC NEW JERSEY: What can you find in Passaic that you can not find in Paris, London or Rome? Find out for yourself. Discover (if you dare) the breathtaking Passaic River and the eternal monuments on its enchanted banks. Ride in Rent-a-Car comfort to the land that time forgot. Only minutes from N.Y.C. Robert Smithson will guide you through this fabled series of sites…and don’t forget your camera. Special maps come with each tour. For more information visit Dawn Gallery, 29 West 57^th Street” (104) .

Other key considerations:

“All of these added elements would ‘expose’ the terminal as a coded environment, a ‘picturable situation’ that could be read in a number of different ways and from a number of points of view.” “These aerial sites would not only be visible from arriving and departing aircraft, but they would also define the terminal’s manmade perimeters in terms of landscaping” (156)

“In other words, [specific objects]…are never whole; in fact, they can be confined to minute fragments of primate traits of an object” (147). SEE: DIOXIN.

“In choosing to ‘map’ a site in New Jersey in his first nonsite, Smithson follows another one of the most basic conditions of map making: ‘start with your own home terrain’” (157).

“The local almost always indicates the global, just as the present exists only as a faint echo of the past” (175) 

Breeding Breath

I (k)now this. Bartleby is a good friend of mine. I've said this before.

Maybe my experiment is too descriptive, too methodological--in short, too literate. Give me a picture that pictures my frame of mind: my attitude, my shift, my disjunction. I've said this before:

I have no homing device. Not the content of my pictures, but the style and approach of many of my pictures should reflect this. Give me a photo that refutes my photo. I can only give you a heart, shaped like a box, without any content. I can offer up a shape, and maybe some style. I cannot tell you what THIS is.

E-mails for our course were meant to be meta-blogs. I am going to invert this, however, and use the blog to meta e-mail.

Instructions:
1. Understand metaphysical limits, and use this to approach becoming-what-you-are (appreciate the gates and know Daimon; and get to know Nemesis if you have to).
2. Make the ontological aesthetic. We are entering into a paradigm of pleasure/pain, of "aesthethics."
3. Avatar (as concept, as noun) vs. TO AVATAR
4. Flash Reason has/needs-to replace the Kantian notion of critical judgement.
5. Now and the Moment: use the GPS to better understand your EPS (to avatar).

My sustaining state of mind: anxious. I don't mean this in the sense of this present "moment," or in the sense of this course; I mean this in the sense of my existential composition at large. There are other conditions to add: paranoid, self-interested, observant, neurotic, doubtful. This state of mind, with all of its multiplicities and assemblages of conditions, inform and instruct my "self." They guide my orientation towards what it is I (want to) do with my life, particularly with regard to scholarship. Finitude troubles me: fear and trembling. As such, I have been focusing on my own apartment because the question of material limits--especially in the given sense of a "home," perhaps in the more GPS sense--very much govern my internal set of metaphysical limits, perhaps in the more EPS sense. My air conditioner re-marks (in its noisy vibration), but I only receive it as re-mark-able because of my particular presence (bound up with all of my otherwise absences).

My (Becoming) Motto: Home is Where the Cart Is.

In other words: Bartleby is a good friend of mine. What is there to ask?

The question, I suppose, would be the constant move towards the interrogative itself that practically governs my anxious life. I take this picture of my apartment, because it moves me: it takes me somewhere; it draws desire inward; it instructs me; it (re)presents joy; it positions me existentially/metaphysically. I develop an "aesthethics." I take pictures of my home. But this is not my home. Home should have some kind of ontological terra firma, right--a kind of Being to which our otherwise Becoming selves eternally return towards, yes?

Instructions:

1. Visit for the self: travel, do not "tourism" (see: McDisney Vacationing)

2. Interact with the "aesthetics" (sites, museums, landmarks) you otherwise simply consume for the sake of consumption. 

3. Be an active part of the picture; don't just buy the (postcard) pictures. 

My Figures: Rimbaud and Henry Miller wander the streets.

 

My (Being) Motto: "New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth." Yeats.

My EPS and GPS are scrambled because my sense of home, in both cases, are not in any sense clear. This is what guides my anxious interrogative: how? Not why, or what is it, or what does it mean--but how? The uncanny (unheimlich/heimlich) carries a different kind of metaphysical weight for me; it sends me on a different kind of line of flight. An anxious, interrogative one, a doubtful one, a questioning one. Blank Confession: I am not welcome "home," in the classical and literal sense, and I spent the last seven months of my undergraduate career living in Moos Tower and the library (clothes in a locker; gym showers; decent couches, though). This is why my own air conditioner re-marks to me in a re-mark-able way. It's not Alachua County, per se, but it's my location, in all senses (at least for me). I could listen to it for a lifetime, and in every instant live a lifetime. Experiential rhizomatics. 

I woke up one morning hearing my air conditioner as loudly as Proust bit into that madeleine.

This is all to say that my experiment leads me to my inevitable and obligatory fear, my own self-haunting: all of this is wrong. An extended and reflexive way of asking: am I missing the mark?

 And so I add this:

My presence: you already know I am here, enframed, the agent recording the subjects being recorded, which is to say I am not here/there; and this is to say I am never merely here or there. This is a cloudy day, let’s say, a cold one: this takes me back to a time of warmth, a yearning for it. I feel it. I am there; I want to capture this moment. Aesthetics invite me, very much if not exactly like the commodity does: pleasure-now-yes. It’s never that simple: here I have a home, but I must follow candle rules, I am gated in, enframed, the air conditioner nightmare reminds so; there I have no home, but I am free, opened up and thrown endlessly into the world, subject to the elements. These are merely different angles from the self position, each testing limits a bit differently (if at all, I have yet to fully know, such being part of my tendency and orientation towards limits, at least so far [i.e., necessarily so far, as such]. 

My GPS—candles haunting the privilege of my home; public space without privacy revealing me
endlessly—only cast context on my EPS. Rimbaud and Miller did not merely wander
the streets, and they did not also merely take up and soak in lavish pleasure when
they could as well; they did not merely about this; they truly wanted to
reproduce this, to project it out, recreate it so as to endlessly embrace it. 


Indeed, I am in poverty because I want so much and have so






much so that I can expend so much: my place is constantly messy because I want

to make it clean, and vice versa. It is strange to get drunk to get sober, so
as to get truly drunk again: heimleich/unheimleich so literally and figuratively true, as nestled in my gut of guts. The full blast of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, of his rhizomatics, his folding over, becoming attached itself to never because of a critical appreciation of it. No. It was an


aesthetic approach towards life, a way of being, rather than explanation of

what being is. It was a how. A book not as a box with contents; a book as an
empty box (Negotiations). This has always been my home. 



Limits: figuratively and literally, at least in my existential narrative. Enframing. Walls and ceilings, literally and figuratively. The context shifts, but the Moment exacts and opens up my EPS. Becoming-what-I-am in reception of these circumstances—these circumstances constructed by an examination, an aesthetic undergoing: my air conditioner reminds me every fifteen minutes to a half hour. 





The other day I found myself stuck in an elevator. A literal (always still figurative) elevator. Turlington Hall. Once I was stuck in an elevator, and everyone started immediately getting distraught. They screamed and moved and tried to pry the door open; they pushed all kinds of buttons. I sat there and sighed. I giggled to myself. What an experience, I thought. Then






I moved to push that button—THE ALARM BUTTON. And that awful ringing commenced,



and within seconds, maintenance was there to get us out. They looked at me, and I looked at them. Sometimes it’s okay to embrace the annoyance, if it brings you closer to you, to your position, to becoming-what-you-are. My air conditioned nightmare: such a rattling has never been so pretty—now. 





I receive my past; my present intimates itself to me; my future remains an empty courtyard. I stare baffled through my window into other open windows every day, every night: do they see me? Are they not baffled too? I know not, and perhaps that is the fortuitous cross that I bear. In the adorned halls of this Coca-Cola City, I can only hope that they will stare into


the abyss of the empty soda can long enough—long enough to see that their desire remains primary, their capacity remains primary, their sense of joy remains primary. I happened to happen upon myself here, limits and all. I am always still back in Moos Tower. It’s a gentle haunting. And yet, I am always where I am going, and even more so now. Rimbaud used to have frantic, feverish dreams, and I have them, too: “Onward! Onward!” Or, to use Yeats: “New dreams; new dreams. There is no truth.” 



My air conditioner re-marks, to borrow the Derridean refrain, but its re-mark only became re-markable, to me, in me, and on me, when I woke up and re-cognized it, truly experienced it. I went deeper into it; I was drawn to it. And why not? 




Instructions:

1. Desire your object; be with its otherwise capture; don't just shoot it (dead)

2. Catalogue your existential narrative

3. Frame/construct an epiphany 

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Once Before: Or, Where My Air Conditioner Takes Me

Once before (or, once, if my memory serves correct) I was homeless. I spent the last seven months of my undergrad career sleeping in Moos Tower and the library. I found this to be difficult and liberating. I kept my clothes in a locker; I showered in the gym; I shaved in this private public bathroom stall that also had a sink and mirror. I even worked as a barista right down the street. I had no enclosures, no rent. No gates. No cameras. I had no candles (see: a previous post). As a University of Minnesota student, I had every right to be there (in Moos Tower) and they were open 24 hours. Nursing and medical students would stay there all the time in order to study, and they would often fall asleep. I would just pretend to do the same. The couches were rather comfortable.

You can't see the couches distinctly, but if you look to the background of the last posted picture, then you can see the red couch. Behind that was a better couch. I slept on that. I would hear all kinds of commotion, but later in the night this commotion would consist of mechanical and operational doings.

I had to live strategically. I am not endorsing nomadic living, but this is why rhizomatics is important to me:

University of Minnesota had a network of underground tunnels that allowed you to get around everywhere. It was warm.

Strategy for sleeping in a library: put two chairs together and curl up. They (the computer lab monitors) cannot see you when you're down sleeping. Sleep in the back. Pretend like you were doing research.

My air conditioner re-marks: see, is my re-mark not re-mark-able? I am stuck between limits, always, now. The Continuum and its gates, its point of (in)direct exile makes me ill. The candles: eat your heart out, kid. Your existential position: roam, roam; row, row. Everybody row. I gag on the idea of a bright-eyed project from anyone not familiar with the tactics of that which is without: home. Thus, the odd pictures of my apartment.