[...]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
hassle
inordinate distance


#on getting lost with Janina: “this is an adventure and I am not alone.” (anxious + hervorheben رهسپار شدن)
(with Janina ♥ we experienced) disorientation, displacement, and the experience of getting lost (are foundational sensory modes of living out regionality)
*wondering out: palpably unpredictable and seductive; a specific disorientation
•half-deliberate exercise of getting yourself lost
•direct link between intention and effect
* dragging agency into a منشور prismatic affective structure * [prismatic: flickering, gathered into lines, angles of light or motion to attune to, =/= simply present and knowable]
•lost in a loop
*run: fueld by (performed) anxiety, our trip was peppered with moments of disorientation
-the enactment of disorientation poised on the edge of the accidental
-with Janina somehow we found ourselves in an exercise of orientation/disorientation as it is attaching me to place, childhood, some buttom line humanity (called Ungeschicktheit) that depends on giving up competence*** (and often finding oursevels orienting with that rainbow caterpillar disoriented on your forehand)
---our shared ‘should-have-been-obvious'es with Janina
---Janina's misshapen forces*** --somehow--> reach a plane of expressivity (for me--because i love her?)
---the event, its affective structure, is familiar from childhood and strangely satisfying, like a loop i had to make, *an emotive-agentive place i had to check in with* --?--> Janina + Sina forms of belonging
(sometimes that place is a fully-invested connection and weighted, like home)
***forms of belonging: tactile + full of force + tentative + risky /--{"+” : are, and, yet}
--> an ecology of paths that matter by means of the things that happen in a present in which we are *lost yet attuned*

--> all the ways that people and things venture out into reals [my mother, Sina, Janina, ...]


[*]town: currents of difference, affiliation, history, ordinary dullness and comforts, characters and their stories


psyching out ethnicity


(my old attunement:) the fear of cockroaches

the miracle mile of computer technology

the elitism of the historical societies

localness nests in:
•tastes
•bodies
•neigborhoods
•a valley
•a state
•a geographical region


“in each scene of the production of history there are events that are storied or otherwise pulled into play” (Stewart)

Stewart on salem witch trials
the accusations spiraled through families, catching people up like magnetic strips
“wicked little sorceries” -->{jumpy moments that suddenly lay the charge of a half-known intensity onto ordinary people and roads, regionality becomes a wicked little sorcery. a vortex that pulls possible forms into life into a moment's alignment}, {the adjective ‘wicked’ marking *excess* of all kinds}
astrology
fortune-telling
*an attunement to specters*
-a farmer admitted getting into ‘the snare of the devil’ because he had a large family and ‘the world went hard with him.’


robustness in cold weather


[title]
making of edges and scenes in ajayeb

character or texture of an edge

(ajayeb is made of elements that were) a thing sensed with certainty (yet made up of a shifting, edgy composite)
[a sentient shadow called jinn, God, darkness of a pit, a cycle, etc.]
--or--> made scenic *as a site of a world's potential* (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise

an edgy irruptive event

rules and edges are OK when separate, but together, a bad comb[...]