[...]rlant)
•

concept: that which attunes itself to things coming into form; is both abstract & concrete; actual & unfolding

highly fractured stone of a collective intensity (--> Iran, and most other places)

______________


ajayeb was/is very much committed to the concrete: that means committed to speculation and curiosity (and not the demystification and uncovering truths that support a well-known picture of the world) (it was only to a certain degree in support of the middle age islamic picture)

*a something both animated and inhabitable

how to approach a weighted and reeling [walk as if unable to control one's movements] present?
(to name)

(Stewart > Berlant:) objects and scenes of desire hold promise, keeping whole clusters of affects magnetized to them
-an individual's abstract yet contingent desire to feel like he or she is “in” something or can recognize something [@Lili, Aela]

***promise is always promise to be present to the scene


i am reading in ajayeb the actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind an sets in motion

exert palpable pressures

(working with ajayen equip me with recognizing the) immanent نافذ, obtuse پخ, erratic ويلان (=/= “obvious meaning” of semantic message and symbolic signification;) to pick up density and texture
(in tasavof, in iranian poetry, in ajayeb, in my peer's works, )
-asking: what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow persent in them --> potentiality & resonance


(according to Stewart) ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meaning*** (in short: canon of “Thinking”) --> “bigger” structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities
-Sven's ordinary affects and DJings --> his noncoherent singularity ==> a nonrepresentational theory is needed to address them
asking Sven:
•what needs attending to (for you)?
•what/who are you in conversation with?



[scenes and selves]***
•layered textures of a scene



(paying attention to pressure points of ajayeb ==>)
in ajayeb, what is
•maintained as a prized possession
•left to rot
•hardened into little mythic kernal
•morphed into a cold dark edge
•hopeful
•
•
--> things take place as [*]precisions: the pressure points that open onto potentialities are taken up as apparitional things (surat صورت) and then sharpened and repeated in compositions that labor to describe but also flourish on their own terms


my efforts have not been to finally “know” ajayeb, Sven, or Sana, [i have been reluctant to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on with them,] rather to fashion some sort of address that is adequate (and fabulous) to their form
-does the intensity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer

#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact

?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•

watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us

______________


“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)

poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)

[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
•compositions at work


my ajayeb's
•objects of analysis: “compositional elements of thrown together worlds”
•objects of critique: “associative account of the modification and reciprocity of bodies and actions, environs, senses, rhythms, tones, and proprioceptions"[: sense of the position of parts of the body, relative to other neighbouring parts of the body]
•objects of database: “are soicialy, poetically, materially compositional”


the social, the subject, matter and event are comprised of:
•affects
•potentialities
•energetics
•attunements
•orientations
•disorientations
•atmospheres
=/= finished actualities*


ajayeb is compositional, that means something reaches a point of expressivity, something throws itself together as matter already configured yet enigmatic and provocative
(Stewart helping me talk ajayeb)

(am i working to) bridge between more compositions (?)


“watching a spider negotiate its unlikely territory”


(useless concentration)


Foad, Sina, we were a slipstream of sensations made of all the ways that world impressed itself upon us


[*]world: a partial stabilization of practices, capacities, tendencies and affordances in the form of a recursive patterning (Anderson + Harrison > Stewart)
•mixed-media compositions of matter and thought-feeling
•the world of ajayeb magnetizes materialities and forms of alertness for me to what's singular and prolific. i am circling through a heritage of (iranian) romanticism and pragmatism to arrive (with Stewart) at “the precision of a worldly composition's mattering forms”
◦*worlding: happens as matter poems composed of sensations, motion, bodies, and objects (--@Luisa)
•an attachment to the forms and forces of emergence and concrescence itself [...] in the actuality of this and that

learning from my mother by moving in the manner of her

we become *sentient* in making massages that courses in-between self and world

[*]pragmatist (thought): a moment like the front edge of an advancing wave crest always becoming more than itself

[*]writing: an experiment that can register years of living out the thing that is just then froming up the world as “...”


love folters and blows


Janina, teaching me, being in love with the surface of the world

@Elen, she shouts: drive! and see what happens to your senses.


Taussig's “I Swear I saw This” is the stuff of ajayeb. he wrote a book about a drawing he made in his notebook when he saw what might have been a woman leaning over what looked like a man lying down at the enterence to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in 2006 --> ajayeb is also about writing about what ‘might’ be or have been.

**a mediation on writing and drawing in a horrible world**

#my drawings in my notebook/papers in our apass meetings
-a hand that draws a scence also draws itself into its corporality, conjuring it in the manner of
-a line records as for what it leads the doodler to see
-“a autobiographical record of a discovery of an event” --> a trace and suspension of a wobbly emergence of alertness (to what my friend might have said) ---> these are lived abstractions


possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings


life is germinaly جرثومه‌ای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney

[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immateria[...]