11/15/08 outside pomona at borders on way to phoenix to vist grandma

we are reading godel, escher, bach, among a bunch of other great reading. i've been making a habit of underlining important feeling passages and i want to record them here so they push a little further into my brain. the book so far is about the nature of self-referentiality that these famous folks explored and the implications of the concept which spans up to the formation of the human consciousness (or at least that is where i think this is going). he makes this statement about escher dealing with a painting of his in which a person is essentially watching themselves from above:

"these two levels might be the only explicitly portrayed levels. but the mere presence of these two levels invites the viewer to look upon himself as part of yet another level; and by taking that step, the viewer cannot help but get caught up in escher's implied chain of levels, in which, for any one level, there is another level above it of greater "reality", and likewise, there is always another level below, "more imaginary" than it is. this i itself is mind-boggling. However, what happens if the chain of levels is not linear, but forms a loop? what is real and what is fantasy?"

powerful stuff. we've only read thru the intro and partway of the first chapter. in it he gets into the mathematical basis, posited by godel, that there is no infallible system of logic, that there can be inserted paradoxes in all systems, which calls into doubt anything we think we know. these are self-referential paradoxes which seem to cancel each other out by the nature of them being true. for instance, "i am a liar. i am telling a lie". where does reality begin- what is creating its sense of realuty? one is defining the other, and yet they are mutually exclusive. 

and here hofstadter sums up the three men of his book:

"i realized that to me, godel, escher, and bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence."

i love this analogy, it sums up many things that feel similar that i experience.

i was explaining to hunter this past weekend as we were having a journey at land's end in sf about my awareness of structure and form. i hadn't talked explicitly about these ideas since the famous harbin trip with ember. structure is the underlying essence, the core framework. form is the way that structure may appear. the structure behind contact improv is a set of agreed-upon approaches to interacting. the form it can take is new every time there is engagement. 

this came up with him where we were doing one of my partner flow deep stretches. i was getting into my yoga awareness, engaging here, releasing there. it feels as though i have been bringing together the structures of yoga and contact improv. hmm, interestingly, both disciplines could be called forms of the structure of kinetic awareness....have to sit on that one. it would look as though structures can be forms themselves.

good stuff!

we've been camping out in the truck. last night we were in a back corner of a residential area in galeta, ca, abotu 80 miles from LA. its funny living out of one's car. it feels illegal and sketchy. sometimes i feel anxious about safety and security of our things. there's also the concern of being locked into the back of the truck. i guess someone would have to have smoething to lock us in with, but all it would take its a stick. at least we could escape from the windows....

today we continued our search for a good beach to work on and came across a nice one in santa barbara. as most of the beaches we've come across in so.cal, the beaches have been very slim, even on these really wide swinging tide days. yesterday we did a long ropy, 'cell' style. today we continued dipping into the designs we've held for these types of situations. i even pulled out my phone and started looking through for photos i've taken of designs. we settled onto one that is quite abstract, of what looks like a collection of ocean rounded pieces of cross-sections of wood. it came out stunningly. its our first abstract truly design. so far we've worked from natural underpinnings. this one was as well, but its overall composition feels much more abstract than anything we've yet done. i really like the direction this is going and what this can open us up to.

"until there is commitment, there is hesitancy"

"genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities"

from artsist way book: "possibillity is far more frightening than impossibility. freedom is far more terrifying than any prison."