Sunday 22 June 2014

93 DIFFERENT PLACES

"Do you need anything?"
  ”Pardon me?”
"He wants you to have anything you might need.  That’s rather literally anything, by the way, since you’re working on one of his special projects."
  ”Special?”
"No explanations, no goals cited, no budgetary cap, absolute priority in any queue.  He describes it as a species of dreaming, the company’s equivalent of REM sleep.  He believes it’s essential…"
                     — William Gibson, “Spook Country”

Sometimes I feel only music can write the code I need, the descriptions of absolute phenomena, rich in non-specifics, that will allow me to prepare for the next set of Tibetan prayers ahead of time.  Music such as this, a continual high-speed collapse of a song, a breathtaking mix of compression and purity, of triggered and scattered cognitive bliss.  A world of databases and furniture combined.

On the street a woman is wearing a t-shirt which says “because of you”.  I like the way it suggests invisible or unnamed or imperceptible causations.  Nobody knows where things are coming from anymore - it is a time of inheritance and grace.  A quiet time - with voices.

I already know the voices: what I’m dreaming right now are the instructions that come with the voices, the writing of the instructions, and the packaging of the writing.  A writing like radar and radio and radiation and reckless love sonnets and an everyday kind of yesterday; a packaging like homelessness.

In William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ there’s a guy who chalks out GPS grids on the floor of whatever structure he is presently staying in and refuses to sleep in the same square twice.  I think about him so much - I mean ‘think’ in a nameless, fraying, post-calculative sort of way, a thinking perfumed with dumb admiration.  The guy’s in deep - real deep - in some ghostly new world that’s coming, a witness to tomorrow’s unimaginable ordinary.  He’s actually quite a dodgy character but for this action alone he shone for me.  Back in 2008 I myself slept in 93 different places as I wandered - chalkless - around the world.  And although I wasn’t involved in data espionage or anything like that some of my activities were delicate enough for me to coin the phrase ‘buddhist outlaw’.

I give the name ‘biographeme’ to those parts of another’s biography that are invisibly or potentially your own.  As a buddhist monk I think its more important to be open to biographemes than to create a biography.  Biographemes dont belong to (or describe) any one person. Your life doesn’t have to be your own, it just has to be recognisably yours.

Culture, ultimately, is about generating biographemes of sufficient quantity and quality that people can use them to liberate themselves from samsara.

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