Sunset and music

The mud putty sky, dark and wet like dirty fur, and the helicopter coming by. The sharp angle of the flat plaster on the side of the house, and blue light sitting like a garden gnome, fanning across the wall. Sorry, but I couldn’t pay full attention to the music.

70-or-so people in this blue and purple light, listening to slow music wind, with the garage hanging overhead, the floor of who's living there resting on everyone’s dome. Stars already out.

I don’t think attention is something you pay, and is more like the light on the head of an angler fish, guiding and/or dragging you towards things. At the same time, the light is pushed around by the fish.

That is, to "pay" attention feels like giving too much credit to our ability to dole it out. It's not ours to give. Attention is informed by proximity; we make tailwind and cannot play helpless in the face of distraction. Distraction, too, is set into effect by how we move. Setting ourselves up is perhaps another way to think about this.

Attention is movement through the field of activity. Meaning is what constitutes the field.

"givenness has lost its transparency, and we can no longer see our way through the game of smoke of mirrors that representation has become.”

- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

I’ve written before about how slippery meaning is, and how far gone we are from the images we’re presented with being evidence for what they hold in them. We can still glean a sense of reality from representation. It’s lowkey just become way easier to tell when swag is really present.

There is an objectivity to rely on ——————- it’s all entirely what we make it

But there has to be a response, an attitude, that neither naive realism nor social constructivism expect or account for.

Accountability for what appears / Just let the bad idea #be

It always felt like a cop-out for objectivity to be unattainable, invisible, concrete, or pre-existing. It's an agreed-upon recognition of a situation, aka where we're at.

This is tied to

thinking about working hard to not produce (as in manufacture) desire. I want to avoid manufacturing at all costs, and to instead fulfill. To bring up + about what's already springing from the heart. There's enough stuff already in and out there to capture and bring to light.

From io: there’s something deeply gratifying about seeing someone #keep #going, despite being aware of all the struggles, imperfections, and having no real reason to.

+++the willingness to see “off” ideas all the way through--exploring what doesn't quite fit, setting down an idea that isn't a perfect match for the other things on your mind.

You can force yourself to focus on the "right" thing, or not.

Empty nostalgia cocooning into meaning

We've been living through an ironic, sarcastic time. So much disingenuous engagement w things that people feel afraid to enjoy. Distance is an accessible defense mechanism: a thing has to be so bad it's good, or a guilty pleasure.

People often show that they're laying down the road of irony to get them to genuine enjoyment. The funniest joke is a lie, and laughter gets you to the truth. But the things we've indulged in ironically have become real cultural staples. We're starting to actually make space for meaning in previously meaningless zones.

Kinda related: I feel that "nostalgia" has been characterized by an emptiness, an idea that people don't know what they're pulling from or referencing, they're just emulating an image. But because so much attention has been devoted to that empty container, we've ended up filling it. Color has been added to the empty-nostalgia game, unavoidably, because it couldn't stay empty forever. We plug the dam, fill our cups.

Something blooms in scorched earth. Follow it!!