(sometimes withershins, widershins or widderschynnes) means to take a course opposite that of the sun, going counterclock-wise, lefthandwise, or to circle an object, by always keeping it on the left. It also means "in a direction opposite to the usual," which is how I choose to take it in using it as the title of this blog. We're all in the same world finding our own way.
You make me fall in love with your stories and your cares and your worries and your stares. It's not you, it's me. It's not me, it's you. All these insecurities touch me, grab me, pull me in. I feel your love and it becomes mine. I love on your behalf where you can and where you can't.
You make me fall in love every time you fall in love with someone else. It's painful. It's terrifying. All these strangers piercing my heart though we've never met, I see them in a new light. It's blinding bright: hurting, heart-shaped holes the only shadows unrequited.
I want you to stop. Stop loving. Stop caring. Stop telling me about it. But no, that's not the way this works. I'm a conduit. I'm translating this experience, making it accessible , but I wonder for whom?
Catalysts, we are agents of change. Networked and hardwired to receive and act. I take this in, redirect it, funnel it down a different path of this spider's web woven. Self-identified as a hub, I stand tall in a center with no boundaries. Forever.
Left-side. Left-side receives and listens. Carries across, translates into form. Words? Images. Picture me this, standing, leaning in the doorway, waiting for you to realize you can come in. The door is open. This is home. Home because you have carried it here on your back.
Let it sit. Let it stand. Freedom songs of the snails and turtles belong here. Radiate outward. Breath in with my hands. Breath out with my hands. Feelthem beat and break the knots that tie you down. Gulliver broke free from the grasp of such small worries.
When we care, it's a trade. Energy exchange in unequal expressions of entropic excess. I see red and blue at odds, polar offspring of the warm and cool emotional spectrum. I am blue: grounded, present and calm contrast to the lost red, the anger and fear that takes control . I take it and tame it, balance but I am no savior.
Reception is all about giving. Provide, provide, take you inside. A letter separated from the ultimate booby-trap. Sometimes we call it bait. Wait.
Redirect.
Positive spin. Clockwise or widdershins? The machine, perpetual motion, turns itself.
When the words call to me, I write. I type. My fingers fly, nimble nails and tendons dancing across the this touch screen madness that is the word we call virus. I play keyboard like a musician at his keyboard, eyes closed, touching the sounds, the sights, the vision I seek to create. click clack Type. A. Type B. Type O-positive. Where do I fit. Question mark correction.
And I avert. My eyes, to talk to this person sitting next to me, this indentation on the seat cushion. Play with my hair again and I will melt. Replace that, find me an answer on your quiz. I'm surrounded on the literal of the metaphors. Screen names I see, faces reflected reflecting para-personalities.
downward dog amazing but excrutiating
And I hear voices. They're speaking to me. They're talking talking words in, around, through and on. Music, sound, interruption. I feel the energy. Feel it like the swirling colors of this screen tickling my retinas. And I want to move, to dance, to groove the night away. I don't need no alcohol, just give me a beat. thump thump thump. You are colors to me, ruthless eddies of emotion buffeting me, slapping me hard in the face. A punch to the solar plexus, send me wind-milling backwards, upwards, twirl twirl twirl as I spin on the ball of my foot.
Type type type. This is my piano/keyboard cat love ailurophile definition of a new word. Sunset horizons are the beginning of the night. Make it long and hard on the recovery. Strong on the drive.
And I'm losing it, this stream of consciousness. I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't. Want to. I want. Let me climb up on the banks and dry off.
I serve my purpose to these people. In the capacity of friendship, feedback generator and bouncing board, etc. I am available because I make myself so, sharing books, time and ideas and what do I get?
I get exactly what I ask for. Which by nature of our relationship, isn't much: the occasional conversation and tea. Did Harker ask much of Dracula? What does the country mouse ask of the city mouse? What did Master Abraham ask of Murr?
As I sit in class now, listening to the conversation about Serres and what we're getting, what we want from the text, I think the question applies here as well. We are the excluded third of Parasite. It's pushing us where we're used to pushing the text, forcing our way in. What are we asking of the text? But also, what is the text asking of us?
I state it here: I'm pushing. I'm asking that you push back.
And that's what I believe the text is doing as well. Pushing us and the only way we can understand it is to push back.
Our Parasites
"If we're going to compare the class to a sort of organism, why not go with the metaphor of an immune response. Sure, it may have been rude of Eli to interrupt and not be completely in terms with the way the class is run, but I personally found her input stimulating.
If you completely isolate a biological system, say our class, and then randomly introduce foreign bodies, you kind of have to expect a certain level of chaos to accompany that introduction. Exactly like what happens when those little black critters get in through the little boy's nose (mouth? I don't remember). [Referring to a video we'd watched]
My point here is that I don't think Eli served so much as an invader as she did a vaccine. You can't expect the incoming bodies to follow the same routine and must adapt accordingly until they are gone. "
I take this quote from a blog post made by someone in the Nanotext class I had with Tony last spring.
The post was about a girl, Eli (pronounced like what is perhaps the more familiar spelling of Ellie), who visited the class at the invitation of one of our peers and the reactions the class had to her on plurk afterward.
I bring this up because I see it as being relevant to our Parasites class. Would we have the same kind of reaction? I hope that with all our discussion of the interruption that the answer would be no, but if I recall correctly, even in Nanotexts, we'd just finished a rather lengthy section on alterity and the meaning of the other, the exterior.
In thinking about this though, I'm brought to the question of what is a parasite unto our collective Parasites class? Clearly there are a select few of us in the 2:30 class who are parasites upon Tony's time. We're welcomed by the gracious host that he is, but even still, we encroach on his office hours, essentially owning the class from the inside out as we discuss what is, what was and what is to come: often eying others as an intrusion.
And here, I think the answer is in ourselves. We are our own parasites, interrupting and disturbing the quiet status quo of the class. To relate to another text from Nanotext we are the Ned Slades upon the Hand. We have infiltrated the system and are slowly destroying it from the inside out. This is our education.
A last point on the idea of ideas
I've already posted this as a plurk update, but wanted to reassert and expand upon it in a more cohesive format:
We hear talk of energy and tend to think it is bound within the realm of physics, that it obeys the first law of thermodynamics, but with the energy of ideas -- or rather ideas as a form of energy -- this is wrong. Ideas and technology work together as a kind of perpetual energy machine, generating more energy (ideas) than is input and required in other systems. The teme is self-replicating. It is parasite.
It's a matter of infrastructure. We've built the kind of infrastructure in our technology that allows this growth with minimal maintenance. To send a message to 20 people no longer takes a three hours of writing, 1+ days travel per message, etc. Yes, we've expended that kind of energy in building the technology to allow us to bypass that, but that was a one-off. We do not use that every time we send a message. We're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Once we've sent off enough ideas, the exchange of that being sent versus that being put in to maintain the system becomes uneven. Our investment has more than paid for itself.
If we think of the meme/teme as a unit of the energy of an idea, we see that this growth has the potential to be exponential. A hyperlink, a small underlined blue word can send us to a page full of thousands more words, images and even videos. Or you input 5 words, and it's replicated 20 times with the same amount of energy it took you to put those in.
We see it here in that video we watched in class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
A simple search of a few key words brings us thousands (and even thousands upon thousands) of search results, of ideas. And I've said it before and I'll say it again; ideas are dangerous. Ideas are parasitic in their ability to control you. This whole update represents the small seed of Tony sitting next to me in class on Wednesday and mentioning the word energy. Like clicking an internal hyperlink in my mind, we take one simple word and expand it.
I'm running out of energy, worrying about stretching myself too thin. It's not a matter of stress, but a matter of time. I'm everywhere at once, going nowhere fast. I know I can keep this up at least for now, but I need a break. Thanksgiving weekend sound good to anyone?
Activities keep me busy, but I can't focus on any of them the way I really want to. I feel like my writing for nanoNaNoWriMo is fair to middling at best; the only class I pay full attention in is Chinese (which I hate) because I know I'll fail if I don't; I'm too tired to be as enthusiastic as I'd like in everything else and the only time I see friends are either when I'm studying, eating, in class, or working on one of these projects with them.
It's a matter of priorities and balancing my time. And I'm doing decent so far, but it's draining me. I need something to pull me in, to keep me focussed and to give me reason to want to keep up with this juggling act. I guess that's the question I'm really starting to ask myself. Why am I still going?
I'm far more prone to bouts of irritability and don't feel like my normal, positive self. I know that's not who I am or who I want to be, but I don't really know how to get back to that place without somehow failing in areas that really mean a lot to me. Involvement is what I do, I can't help it, how do I make this worth my while?
That said, somehow I'm happy. Yeah, tired and stressed and desperately in need of more days in the week, but happy. I love being this busy even if I'm slowly going insane. Call it a bad habit from my days as a student journalist.
