[...]the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme

(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)

[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent

the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature

*connections and commitments (come together)*

the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to copy but, if anything, of the responsibilities entailed in producing differential materialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥


(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings

(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature


entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities

there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”

who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”

[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering

...................................

Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,

our resistance and breakdance

(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه


moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’

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the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity

...................................

the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence


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ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,

my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)

ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,

(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,

medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discourse -->? politically subversive
•linguistic fragmentation, edges of meaning
•


...................................

dense and textured stories

(generativity is fueled by) densely felt textures

worlding of the place:
•the material, sensory labor of attending to an emergent and enduring hum
•the force of things amassed of phantom limbs
•actual residue of people “making something of things”

direct materiality of people's shared sense = attending to what is happening

a racist violence in the dark
a space of condensed displacement

watching things arrive in the company of others

*nameable clarities:
•family
•friendship
•love
•collapse
•laughing
•telling stories
•violence
•place
•
--> all atmospherics*** : forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities. [Stewart]

(Stewart's) curious pause to wonder *what analytic objects matter* in the singularity of a situation and what forms of writing and thinking might approach them****
-experimenting with forms of theory and writing that are responsive to the moving objects they are trying to trace or highlight or escape, or whatever --> #number of legs in ajayeb {
•trying to describe what is happening in little animal moments, scenes
•(the writers of ajayeb trying to) explore the intensity and plasticity of lived compositions--proliferating in their world
•the senses sharpen on the surfaces of things taking form
•a lived affect ==> pushing a present into a composition, an expressivity (--> ajayeb's body)
•(a non-horizontal plane of) incommensurate elements hanging together in a compositional atmosphere =/= holding objects in abeyance تعليق in order to evaluate them as good or bad, or, asserting oppositions between material and representational things
}


[*]attunement: a generative, compositional worlding
-particular attunements can become habitual

-(in the atmospheric of my ajayeb) what is recognized as worthy and knowable object
-what are the links [sensory & affective] between (my) ajayeb's worlding and other worlding

{ migraine ---> house }--> (an acute) sensory attunement (to the atmospherics of the house)
migraine: “black-furred creature beginning to stir”


Foad's atmospheric attunements, responses to the environment
(fully sensory, at once abstract and concrete)*
•a labor
•a sentience to a world's work
•ways of being in noise and light and space

intimacy with a world <----> world's imperative

*an imperative can:
•catch you up
•then deflate
•pop
•leave you standing, a fish out of water


“the sentience of a situation is filled with tracks of labor and attunement--a dwelling in the expressivity of something coming into existence” (Stewart)

we take the world for what it's up to

[*]atmospheric attunement: actual affects of modes of living being brought into being; labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries
-the lived spaces and temporalities of:
•home
•work
•school
•blame
•adventure
•illness
•rumination
•pleasure
•down time
•release
•phantasmatic or unthinkable situations
•
--> rhythms of the present /*/*/*/*\


ajayeb reports of world:
-dense entanglement of affect, attention, the senses, and matter
(everything depends on these entanglements)

a condition
a pacing
a scene of absorption
a dream
a being abandoned by the world
a serial immersion in some little world you never knew was there until you got cancer
a dog
a child
a hankering
the next thing

(?how much ajayeb tells the stories of) unraveling of states of attending to what might be happening

not being able to sit still
being exhausted
being left behind
being ahead of the curve
being in history
being in a predicament مخمصه
being ready for something--anything


a life's trajectories traverse the materializations of scenes or pulsations
@Foad

atmospheres have:
•gradients
•valences
•moods
•sensations
•tempos
•lifespans
•

an atmospheric fill resonates the edge between the material and the potential

[my recording symptom in 2009 was an atmospheric (not symptomatic) attunement; constant recording; take on the texture and density of a background hum; to produce a felt; barely felt sense of something happening in the house;]
-my father disappearing into violent, abandoning drinking


every person is a nexus of compositional moments
a worlding taking place in difference


!♥ Stewart talking about her stepson becoming a homeless
“People like to simplify the situation of homelessness as if it is a self-evident process of abject poverty without a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]

(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)


(do i also have) the habit of a worlding

trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life

find lines of attachment

***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***

(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*


Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown

______________


[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations*} (Roazan)
-turns spaces into animate envelopes that produce worlds (Sloterdijk)
-a form of worlding--an intimate, compositional process of dwelling that bears, gestures, gestates آبستن, worlds (Heidegger)
-the labored viscerality احشايى of being ‘in’ whatever's happening renders choices, aesthetics, surfaces and materialities *a part of something* (Stewart) ~~apass--> the sentience, of a worlding (lightened by soft scenes of the human condition [played out in:
•forms of pleasure @Sina
•weakness @Maarten
•fun @Elen
•humor @Eszter
•acquiescence رضايت ,تن در دادن @Leo
•self-deprecation اظهاربيميلى @Lili
•the intimacy of قبيح دانستن deprecating others @Xiri
•a bad but human habit @Aela
•some wicked little sorcery @קݙ
•])
-
-an attunement that takes form
-a milieu in which the mouth relaxes into a town accent (نواحی?)
-a disorientation in the face of what lies beyond (Janina)
-a love affair with light and color (Foad)
-uncurtained windows (my mother)
-
-
-->{
•one recognizable entity with qualities
•lived modalities
•a history of its social production and uses
 {elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, pull into alignment, fall out of sync, }--> “a regional aesthetic hardens into iconic scenes of living”


calling to eachother in an intimacy of jokes about the things that can happen in their world

voice:
•the tone
•the timing
•the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•

consistency of a laugh or an edge

***when the muteness of things metamorphoses into an aesthetic phenomenon*** --> singularities incite it

(an actual physical shadow of a state of being)
sing of something amiss:
•depression
•withdrawal
•indifference
•dysfunction


(my mother in Tehran:) a curtained house reduce the gestural economy of seeing and being seen to an occluded vision in which objects are dark, shadowy outlines with black cores, like a world seen through a ripe cataract آب مروارید -->(the house video project i did ‘city of domes’ 2008 http://www.sinaseifee.com/Cathedral.html was actually about that kind of attunement in my mother's house. i was committed to the description of interiority; my allegiance was inward. watchful consciousness in which one witnesses the procession of inner events of light perception <== a sense of lack. sensous grounding of the inner life)
window: a method of worlding in itself, a node of lines of sociality and mood
curtained house --> sign of something amiss (depression, withdrawal, indifference, dysfunction) but “the actual physical shadow of a state of being that broke the circuit of a *gestural economy of seeing and being seen*”
in the maner of my mother: you don't warm up to stranger, you know who you are talking to, you watch what is going on, you help those in the circle
(Stewart describing how in her town) lamps were strongly favored over overhead lighting, lending texture and specifity to the scenes
a pause at a window --> to check in with the unfolding and pleating of a world pulled in and out through the glass <-- this is not just a practice of looking but a mood*, ruminative or touched, for good or bad
•impulse to venture into a place that pulls watchful bodies out of windows


danger
[...]