So what’s up with lacunagroup at present? The group is all about it’s blog threads. Wherever they lead, that’s what we’re doing. As always, we are interested in an active and collaborative creative process. The real work of lacunagroup is as much in the thread as anywhere else. The work goes forward as the thread goes forward. Cryptic, isn’t it?
If you read through comments in the previous post, you’ll follow, in part, the beginnings of a film project. Take a look. The work will be carried forward on this blog as well as in cameras and editing. Please collaborate if you find it interesting. The blog exists for you to make of the work what you will.
Let me throw out another possibility for a project before I talk myself into seeing it as irrelevant. Consider it another start for some kind of collaborative exploration which could turn into something beyond the blog or not. lacunagroup, I hear tell, on occasion, tries to find its way toward working with performances.
A slight, practically inconsequential personal association to autumn. Too general and indistinct to be a memory. What is it, then? Images to accompany a feeling of warm containment. My brother taught me how to throw a spiral during the Thanksgiving holidays one year. Then I was inside watching one of those Hannah-Barbera animated versions of a classic book which always seemed to be on tv during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Between those two sets of sensations fall all of autumn, for me. And all of Winter, too, actually.
So I may spend some of my time on the blog working with this bit of stuff (bit of fluff?). In what way? Who knows? And it is available for anyone else who might want to take it somewhere. My interest is in using the material for any and all manner of ways to step off into experimentation. Still cryptic? Remember, we may not necessarily know what we’re after at the outset. And once someone does know something, it becomes one aspect now maybe feeding or inspiring other gestures. Or not. My hope is that the form things begin to take may be new and challenging.
Why this bit of material as a starting place? Exactly. Good question. And so it begins. I want to investigate it because it’s always there, particularly as the weather changes. Something, too, about it being apolitical and unspecific. Achieving a spiral was like learning to carry out a magic act and transform physical laws. Male bonding, of course. Initiation. Being home. My brother called me “Flash,” and I remember always laughing uncontrollably. The containment of autumn related to the containment present before sleep. Preference for autumn and winter as depressive. Others are free to take it up in some way. Or I may get encouraged to set it aside as my interests drift into something else emerging on the thread.
Fall has always been my favorite month. Can’t say why. I’m usually sick all the way through, due to allergies. This fall is no exception.
Autumn. High school football games. I think of dirty ascot, polyester band uniforms, freezing my ass off on aluminum bleachers, puffs of frosty breath, broken trumpet and oily fingers, cold tip of nose, and LEG WARMERS on purple baton twirlers.
Best evocation of these whiffs of youth (for me, anyway): REM song on their Green album, forget the name. Goes like this:
Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing
I’m very scared of this world
I’m very scared for me.
Eviscerate your memory
Here’s the scene
You’re in the back seat, laying down
The windows wrap around
To the sound
Of the (something) and the engine
All you hear is time stand still in travel
You feel such peace and absolute
The stillness still that doesn’t end
But slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you’ve ever seen
And they’re there for you
For you alone
You are the everything.
And I think that last line is the title.
I think of fishing on Lake Allatoona’s creaky docks with my grandmother. She wore a blue hat. The minnow bucket, always a few floaters. The stars reflecting off the waters. The little fires on the far shore. The boats coming in like moose.
“Fall has always been my favorite month.”
This is the time of year when I try to convince myself I may be pagan. And that may be okay.
Also fascinated by my bodily response. Somewhat bittersweet mortality tinged longing for transport.
Those cartoons were probably very rudimentary.
The key to mastery of the spiral was fingertips along the big stitch and creating the sensation of the ball rolling against the hand as you made the release.
Those cartoons of the late 60s/early 70s were just wretched. But I remember really enjoying Spiderman (does whatever a spider can) and Superfriends.
Paganism has its appeal, I agree. I’ve been really disillusioned with institutional religion lately.
So for my first film I want there to be some surprise, but this is a grand collaborative arc we’re constructing, so here’s a bit of my thinking. Everything came together from my lack of a battery. Since I wanted to go ahead and work now, without a new battery, I begin thinking about what I would have to do technically to have power. So my film is going to be about power and finding the source. I need to find a tale that meditates on questions of power and the source, needless to say. It may seem a touch insincere and opportunistic: my finding a tale to match my concept as opposed to the other way around. But I try not to judge my own processes. And it is very rare for a full blown concept, with a beginning, middle, and end, to pop into my head like this (it did). Usually I generate materials without a goal at the outset. This is going to be a very methodical assembling of elements. Medium Cool, so to speak.
Speaking of autumn. Can you fully illuminate the nature of a seasonal mood? In a performance?
If I say I prefer Autumn/Winter to Spring/Summer, I like believing (and I don’t know that I should) I’ve exiled myself from something. As if I’ve had to make a fatal, final choice to stand apart from life. Talk about the Romantic Agony.
What if we reversed the container and the contained with respect to season? Rather than seeing seasonal memory within myself, what if I see myself as a part of a larger seasonal rhythm?
Or if we begin with the idea that there is no such thing as a season, how do we begin mapping human experience? What are the elements that really makes up the overwhelming sensations I experience as seasonal?
Within a story? Possibly. But in preparation, in getting to the point of finding a story, how to find things worth articulating?
If I knew I could never again be in a place which had an autumn, what would that mean? It’s tempting to say, “I’d rather die,” but to persevere in such a miserable situation…
Thought experiment. Are we reaching the point culturally where those who are oriented seasonally are disadvantaged somehow? What if evolutionary psychological adaptation involves structuring meaning totally apart from “natural” and elemental phenomena?
Hm. The late nineteenth century decadent occultists may have been developing a paganism without nature. a rebours.
If there is some kind of personal, historical, specific fantasy scenario beneath my experience of autumn that is actually responsible for the play of sensations at work, what is it? What are the bare minimum essentials “out there” that can trigger the response, activate the fantasy?
It’s interesting that you should bring up seasons at a time when we’re diving into these myths. The myths were ritually re-enacted through the Busk and other ceremonies and dances, which were entirely seasonal. Everything in Native American life revolved around the seasons. Now in our modern life we’ve kind of shut the seasons out. We must live at a constant 70 degrees. We can’t tolerate FEELING anything, anymore. Certainly no discomfort. We’re becoming totally cut off from our environment. That’s why I love hiking the AT. It’s a chance to reconnect.
As for the myth you’re searching for, I think it’s that of the water spider who brings fire back to the people.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/cher/motc/motc002.htm
There are a number of shell gorgets that depict this.
Also, any of the sky tales, where the two boys go off on the White Path (the Milky Way) and encounter their mother (the Sun).
This is fun!
I don’t know if you saw in the other thread, but Barb is in. And she wants to hook up the projector and have a film festival next Saturday to showcase our efforts. She won’t tell me what she’s doing but she seems very excited about it. Let me know if you need a battery ’cause we have an extra one.
Northrop Frye of course, tagged Autumn as the mythos of Tragedy. (Winter was Irony, which at its furthest reach blended back into Spring/Comedy.) So in that way it would seem there have been plenty of people who have illuminated the nature of the seasonal mood.
But I also think of the opening of David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, with the swirling leaves and the huddled mourners; of the final act of Cyrano de Bergerac; and of course, Sonnet 73
Whatever your question, Shakespeare has always done it.
The Tempest feels like Autumn.
Prospero’s Books, definitely.
No need for battery on this one. I’m using an umbilicus. Otherwise I have no metaphor. I might need help recording some audio if I don’t get a piece of equipment back from Tom’s on Wednesday.
So with both the Creek tales and the autumnal musings, I encourage everyone to use the blog to dive in for some creative exploration. Time is limited, I realize, and time online doesn’t always coincide with inspiration and absorption, but feel free to try.
I almost have to trick myself into such immersion. Just thinking about the possibilities makes me quite constipated. Yes, my psychoanalytic background encourages me to bring bodily drives into the mix as much as possible. I’m not deliberately trying to offend.
only autumn whispers in words
and few children want to listen
thank goodness
not too many premature burials
only a few infant souls
bound in a wealth of layers
of old kingdoms and old promises
life is gone by then
once the leaves crack apart
and the old cold is left
disguised, tasting like love
what the hell is that? Was that abstract enough?
But there might be an interesting notion. Is the old cold already there prior to love and whatever fertile longing squeezes out onto the skin in spring?
Is the old cold cultural, carried by drafts in catacombs?
Life and death offering options
Choosing to take the autumnal path. There’s something you could maybe represent in some way.
The most impossible dramatic challenge at this point for me would be to re-create a brother’s comments leading the child to uncontrollable laughter. I’ve only been able to receive, not generate.
Quietism and passivity, pure receptiveness, that’s the tragedy. That’s what this season offers.
One of my persistent themes is evolution marking some of us as discontinued models, and forgive me for invoking it here. What if nature knows at the outset of our lives whether or not we are fit to prosper as organisms and so imprints us with seasonal longings which will either encourage or discourage us from perpetuation. Those marked for closeout are not rendered cold and sterile, mind you; their sensations merely have a certain seasonal hue.
It’s a goofy notion that’s only meant to be interesting as a poetic conceit.
Or more optimistically, what if there is an advantage to any capacity to organize one’s sensations seasonally. How do you portray that capacity and the absence of that capacity? What would it mean to be able to share sympathetic seasonal sensations.
A holistic view might offer that we all have access to all the seasonal sensations as the seasons change; we just have to tune in. Don’t get too tragic, cause you’re just going to cycle out of it.
So my longing for some kind of hibernation is perfectly fine for now. Makes me wonder what time of year it was when I first tried to hibernate by burying myself in mattress stuffing.
I think what you’re actually feeling is Calvinist predestination. Surely you feel that salvation is withheld from you and that all is doomed. What other explanation is there? All this seasonal mammalian response is just evasion.
So, what’s the movie going to be about?
Mine’s about a big frog who gets annoyed with some singing buttocks.
The Southeastern Native Americans talked about Sacred Time as something qualitatively different from regular time. Regular time is linear, but Sacred Time is cyclic. Communal ceremonies like the Busk immersed the whole community in a Dionysian fervor, the world navel opened up, the Black Drink was consumed, sacred powers were unleashed upon the world. Everyone danced in a circle around the axis mundi. The whole society, at these special times, was “reset,” or re-centered. It wasn’t “Busk 1835” or “Busk 1846.” It was THE BUSK. And you were it. If the ceremonies ever ceased, if the dances ended, then the world, too, would end. And so it did.
Yeah, leave create indulgence for the big boys. Though I resist seeing my sad little musings as Calvinist. Resist, mind you. I’m not disputing the diagnosis nor trying to untie your neat little bow.
Much software happiness. Who needs people. I finally loaded the video capture and editing software that came with my camera. It produces mpegs, which my Cakewalk sound editor would not accept. Found and installed a video file conversion program (to get from MPG to AVI). So I can load my edited video as AVI into Cakewalk for mixing, editing, adding sounds and voices, etc, some of which I had already created with various synth software. I can immediately watch the video with my sound edits. It’s pretty sweet. I’ve been enduring a self-imposed exile in the desert for far too long. Live-performance fantasies are a thing of the past. Sound and image, baby. Sound and image. Not a sniffing, superior humanoid in sight.
Gonna pretend it’s all collaborative and reveal all. I’m no mountebank or prestidigitator. I shot one continuous take of about 5 and a half minutes in length. I begin in the branches of a tree, branches coupled with the view of a power capacitor on a distant power pole, power lines, brances, the sizzle of the sun, the trunk of the tree, moving to where I locate the
camera’s power cord running down the front of my body and then to the ground. We discover it’s plugged into a brown extension cord which a few feet farther along is then plugged into an orange extension cord. The camera follows the orange cord as it winds through the yard and then into the house where it ultimately ends plugged into a wall outlet. After a pause I reach out and pull the plug. End. I have to record Molly reading a tale which I will then mix into the film as intermittent narration. I’ve also tried to add some atmosphere by using a few sound treatments. That’s why I need a tale about seeking the Source. It’s fun. I’ve done everything but record Molly and cut that audio into the film.
Re: seasonal busking. Wonder about the nature of the autumnal one(s). Rites associated with autumn. Christian, pagan, occult, other. Autumn festivals. Harvest related, obviously. But what else? I like opening navels, personally. What about using a busk form to establish something new? I like ceremonies where it’s all for nothing. Much ado with the empty autumnal logoi.
I’m fooling myself into seeking the new. Quick, Dale, a citation! I need to be situated!
Okay, so I can’t just drop live performance. Here’s a research project. I’ve always described acting in iambic pentameter as acting on a trampoline. Got me to thinking about poetic meter, form, image, and performance. What if you experimented with how different poetic modes of expression affected the actor and the action? Where will the next viable dramatic poetic language come from? Writing the same material in different ways, using different poetic modes, meter, what have you (a scene composed after William Carlos Williams, etc), and then submitting it to the work of the actor. Can iambic pentameter get new legs (newer then Frost’s diction, say) or is there something new on the horizon? After all, we need language for the busk. Or is this the longing of a sad, stuffy western white man?
I think I will simply consume a Black Drink or three, dance in a naked circle in my back yard, and sing unintelligible words of inconsolable autumnal joy. They may be in iambic pentameter. They may not.
The frog and buttocks thing sounds doable, though.
There’s something interesting about Marc’s project, which I think I will blog about.
Is that a threat?
Actually, the interesting thing about the sacred language the Native Americans used for these dances. They didn’t understand a word of it. “Words handed down,” forgotten meaning, or no meaning. But had to be precisely recited. Just the right number of repititions, done just the right way. No translation for what was said.
I’m using PowerPoint for my film, by the way. Sorry, no fancy software. This is too much work! Praying I will get done in time.
Much of interest in comments. Wish I could comment but must dash.
“Words handed down” speaks to me…more later.
Ceremony at Dale’s. Who’s designated driver?
Saturday may be a problem because of State One Act. We don’t know for sure where it’s going to be, yet, so we don’t know how long for the return trip. Sunday?
The mike I’m trying to use for recording Molly is a stupid WOW headphone mike. Snaps, crackles, pops. Can be justified aesthetically but still….We’ll be done in time. I’m recording her this afternoon. Tomorrow and Friday, in between bouts of vacuuming, I cut and paste.
If ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sunday’ referred to our ceremony, it will have to wait until the following Saturday or Sunday: we fly to Munich on Friday and will be gone for a week. I haven’t decided whether or not to take the computer.
Actually, next Saturday would be good, because I fret that I will probably not finish within the next few days. An extra week would be appreciated.
However, if we need to do it this weekend, we could have the ceremony at our place. I just pray that I will finish in time.
Funny things. Yesterday afternoon I spent some time fiddling with my microphone levels in Cakewalk preparing to record Molly once she got home from school. After much fussing and filtering and a final resigned shrug as I pulled back from the console accepting the snapping and crackling due to an old, cheap microphone wire, I caught my knee on said wire and snapped it off. So much for recording. After chores today I play to go to Best Buy and try and find a microphone that will work both for the computer and as a kind of extension mike for my video camera. I still might be able to record Molly this afternoon before she goes to the studio; gosh, I still might make our deadline. Which is this weekend, need I remind you. (Yes, being a masterless man and a ne’er do well, I have more time for trivial pursuits; I am not without compassion, nor without suitably humble gratitude for my current flexible schedule, so next weekend is acceptable to me if everyone else–who is everyone else, by the way?–would prefer that, though I plan to push to finish early and maybe start another one.)
In order to follow through on some of my Lacan-inspired collaborative strategies, I am going to try and apply some discourse analysis to our messages using my old friends S1, S2, S(slashed), & a. It’s about time for me to risk some practical implementations.
Also, thoughts of autumn, incomprehensible languages, Shakespeare, The Tempest, and the arcane, all got me to playing with thoughts about John Dee, “Elizabeth’s astrologer,” who some scholars consider to be the inspiration for Prospero.
http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/gnosis/dee.html
One of Dee’s dubious accomplishments is to have taken dictation from certain angelic powers speaking through a medium (man named Edward Kelley) and using, apparently, a wholly new language. Dee also received and dutifully set down a glossary and grammar for this “Enochian” language. Getting back to notions of incomprehensible languages “handed down” which claim to articulate fundamental physical and spiritual energies, I thought about how it might be amusing to juxtapose Dee’s language with Shakespeare’s. Autumn as a time for taking comfort in words. Busks consisting of private and idiosyncratic utterances transformed into public events. Origins of words. Falling leaves as the words we are left with and with which we must make do until…spring (?)
Ti toh hi yah
Ti toh hi yah
Ti toh hi yah
Ti toh hi yah
Ha ni nay gi Ha ni nay gi
Ha ni nay gi Ha ni nay gi
Ha ni nay gi Ha ni nay gi
Ha ni nay gi Ha ni nay gi
That’s good. There’s also this, from today’s Writer’s Almanac:
Poem: “Beside the Point” by Stephen Cushman, from The Virginia Quarterly Review: Spring 2006. Reprinted with permission.
Beside the Point
The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn’t say my work,
thank goodness.
The rock in the creek’s not so productive.
The mud on the bank’s not too pragmatic.
There’s nothing useful in the noise
the wind makes in the leaves.
Buck up now, my fellow superfluity,
and let’s both be of that worthless ilk,
self-indulgent as shooting stars,
self-absorbed as sunsets.
Who cares if we’re inconsequential?
At least we can revel, two good-for-nothings,
in our irrelevance; at least come and make
no difference with me.
Too true. Molly’s recorded and I’ve begun adding her track. Hope to finish today.
Divinely superfluous beauty.
How buddhist. How wonderful.
Sooner or later we all succumb to vanity publishing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QAZFuq9t2A
Cool! I can see it but can’t wait to hear it! (I’m at work and there’s no sound card in my computer).
I don’t think I will make the deadline. Maybe I should do a “quick and dirty” production tomorrow and then keep working on my animation for the following week??? That’s probably what I’ll do. Hundreds of slides and so far I’ve only got like 15 seconds of animation. Bummer.
Bravo! We’re off to a rollicking start. Of course, being five minutes long, you are officially disqualified. 🙂 Makes us glad this isn’t a competition, no? Especially since MINE AIN’T READY, nowhere close. Barb is working on hers tonight, or so she says. You’ve inspired her.
Your video is awesome. And, you met the creative deadline. In true form, I am starting the night before it’s due. ah, it’s like being back in college.
YouTube changed the resolution and compromised the picture quality quite a bit. I need to figure out at what point in the data chain I need to adjust something so that won’t happen. Any suggestions?
Jeff pointed out I exceeded the time limit. Let that be his character note.
The shot was going to be as long as it was going to be. Let that be mine.
Any frame by frame work breeds madness, by the way.
If you guys want to post on the “lacunagroup” YouTube page, let me send you the name and password via e-mail.
Wait–we were supposed to make a video? I brought a camera. I suppose I could put something together in these cold, cold nights in Bavaria.
Say hello to our friends in Hofvonstein.
Barb finished her film last night. She’s so excited! She used something called iclone. All she has left is the narration. Alas, I am nowhere near done.
My next inspirational text has to do with Cherokee medicine:
It is exceedingly difficult to obtain from the doctors any accurate statement of the nature of a malady, owing to the fact that their description of the symptoms is always of the vaguest character, while in general the name given to the disease by the shaman expresses only his opinion as to the occult cause of the trouble. Thus they have definite names for rheumatism, toothache, boils, and a few other ailments of like positive character, but beyond this their description of symptoms generally resolves itself into a statement that the patient has bad dreams, looks black around the eyes, or feels tired, while the disease is. assigned such names as “when they dream of snakes,” “when they dream of fish,” “when ghosts trouble them,” “when something is making something else eat them,” or “when the food is changed,” i.e., when a witch causes it to sprout and grow in the body of the patient or transforms it into a lizard, frog, or sharpened stick.
If anyone else is also inspired by this bit, feel free to pursue.
I looked at some tales and myths and was overcome with that gnawing worry over how I might “depict” the action. I don’t think organizing a narrative via a shot sequence would be that taxing, but the work involved in deciding how things would be presented, and in what style, would take over. I would either have to work with actors or fabricate something else or have an everpresent voiceover jogging through too much narration in an effort to make images cohere. All fine things if you commit to working that way. But I’m not ready for that commitment, yet.
I want to do something different that allows me to play with the grammar of film images. The dream aspect appeals because it allows me to follow in some small way my interest in using basic bits of cinema to churn out thoughts and sensations, and to limit my arsenal of images. I could decide to pick only five images and do all my work with those. Contained. Everything spiraling in. And I don’t have to be literal. I may graft this idea onto the task of shooting a figure (me, probably) in a room, at a window, which has been in my mind as an interest over and apart from the requirements of our Southeastern Native American Challenge. Unfair? I don’t know. I may just go outside and capture some images. Right now the desire to seek out images in the surrounding world and then find a process for weaving them is what obsesses. I’m not choosing a human-free landscape deliberately, nor am I anti-narrative. There’s just a part of me that wants to be a Stan Brakhage.
This sounds exciting!
I need to finish my buttocks thing.
I want to use sound and music on this one, if I use them at all, in a way that does not “cover a multitude of sins” in the editing. What is interesting for me in watching a silent procession of images are times at which the beat of the cuts is truly heard and felt in the silence (similar to when I watched Brakhage’s Dog Star Man and eventually started to “hear” the torrent of my circulating blood). I want the sound I employ to respond to or interact with the percussive play of the cuts, not lay there as a bed or background (or foreground, as in a music video).
Turns out Windows’ Movie Maker is a perfectly fine tool for putting together successions of cuts, much better than the program that came with my JVC camera. Automatically breaks up captured footage into shots, too, which is a help. Go figure. More later.
One nice aspect of using the blog as a component in the creative process is the opportunity to review and re-visit and re-approach. An infusing loop of time.
Today I go on a pilgrimage to my childhood neighborhood, but I wanted to throw this out:
Lacanian discourse analysis: the Master’s discourse. The Master’s discourse is present anytime we speak earnestly and without painful reflection. It is the structure of stating belief and asserting identity.
S1 (the Master signifier, the unqualified assertion, the indisputable notion)
S2 (the place of reception for this signifier, the other who is to be instructed or enlightened or informed)
S(slashed) (the divided nature of the Master, the truth of our discontinuities and contradictions)
a (what escapes the scope and umbrella of knowledge, an unassimilated excess is present, often a bodily phenomena, or an irrational propulsion)
(the editor will not let me lay out this next bit properly; sorry)
S1—->S2
__ __
S(/) a
“the word”——->the other (receiver)
_________ _________________
self-division excess production
What is under the bars is usually considered an unconscious dynamic. Note S(/)<>a is the structure of fantasy. This is a useful structure for examining utterances and meanings. In psychoanalysis, this is the structure of the patient’s speaking at the outset. Picking through past posts with this structure might be interesting…
What happens when this schema, itself, becomes the Master?
We all seek a hitching post. Why is that, exactly?
Must be that we dread what is lacking within ourselves. The Barbaric Yawp is not enough.
But there I’ve gone and hitched myself again.
Hmm. Perhaps you fear you are being accosted by a wild-eyed disciple and so wish to bestow the gift of perspective. Relax. Nothing is required of you. No ideology lurks seeking your embrace. Just games.
What is the goal in a game of Go? Good shape.
S1: Barbaric Yawp
S2: ?
S(/): ?
a: ?
?, indeed. I eagerly await some filled-in blanks. Make of that what you will.
Should I take this bait? Normally I just can’t help myself.
The problem is that words confuse us as often as the clarify. Probably more often than they clarify.
There is WHAT IS. Simple enough.
Then there’s us talking about What Is. Trying to describe it, lasso it, quantify it. This is where we run into problems.
So long as we’re continually cognizant of the fact that we tend to speak and think in metaphors, then all is hunky-dory. We’re just playing games. Throwing things out there and seeing what sticks. Keeping what is useful and practical or particularly aesthetically arresting — and discarding the chaff.
But most of us, unfortunately, walk into a restaurant and eat the menu. We mistake our little games for The Truth, for What Is. We forget that we think in metaphors.
Godel has shown us the way. Or that’s the hitching post I’m using today, anyway. I may change my mind tomorrow.
S1: WHAT IS
S2: ?
S(/): ?
a: ?
Take the bait? The assumption being…
Thank you, by the way. Starting tomorrow I will no longer mistake my little games for The Truth. How could I have let myself do that for so long?
If by invoking Godel you mean to show it’s impossible to transcend our operating system using the terms of the system in some way, sure, I’ll hitch to that. Our most beautiful blessed one Jacques Lacan, praise be he, asserts something similar when he says, and I quote, in red, There is no meta-language. Or alternatively, There is no Other of the Other.
I like this idea of striving not to be hoodwinked by language. It means I don’t hav
I want to go back to the “buttocks thing.”
Let me see if I’ve got this right:
S1: buttocks thing
S2: ?
S(/): ?
a: ?
Tra la!
Seriously, ‘splain it to me.
If I understand the Game, will I be able to more easily write something that approaches Part 2, Ch. 1-5 of War & Peace?
Only if you also learn Russian.
I, too, would like more explanation. marc? Enlighten us.
While await the explication, a little sideshow for your entertainment.
A wise man once said:
“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and this itself is the answer.
“Doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
“What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.”
That is all.