[...]>
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 immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events
lostness or reslessness of drifters
fantasies of potential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices
what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,
a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred
pursuit of see-it-yourselfness
a spectacular form of amnesia *
(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes
Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity
shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete
my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)
(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions
textures give way to qualities of form
*before the blizzard: the sea monster
[...]