Mnemonia - Encountering The Stone

#ambientmusic #dreamcore #ooo #slowedandreverb #algorithmcritique I would like to suggest an exercise: find a stone you like. It should be a stone you can hold in your hand without much effort. Pick it up. Hold it in your hand. Maybe put it in your pocket and walk around with it for a few days. You can put it under your pillow when you sleep. You can examine it closely, maybe with a magnifying glass. You can draw it, take photographs of it. You can try to understand the stone. By understanding I mean: find out what kind of stone it is, what it is called, what its scientific name might be. Maybe you can even learn how it came to be in the place where you found it. All these things I suggest, and there are many more, are modes of accessing the stone. They take place in the field that opens up between you and the stone—the inter-objective space, as Timothy Morton calls it. It is the space of appearances: how the stone appears to you. Ask yourself: What is the characteristic of this inter-objective space, the space between myself and the stone? What is it like? Explore this space by experimenting with different modes of access. Notice that each time you approach the stone in a different way—maybe you lick it, or put it under your pillow, or balance it on your head while walking barefoot in the garden—these are also modes of the stone accessing you. The stone touches you, affects you, in its own way. You could see it as a mutual practice: you and the stone, engaged in a common exploration of each other. Of course there are differences between you and the stone. Maybe we can say that stones are more enduring, more passive than humans in some ways. But in another way they are also very much alive: in another timeframe, vastly longer than a human life, the stone is very active and mobile, undergoing many drastic transformations. From that perspective, whatever you do with the stone today—and even if you should carry it in your pocket for the rest of your life—is only a fleeting touch. Its life is so very long and eventful that what happens between you and it is only a minuscule part of its experience. After you have examined the stone for a while, ask yourself: can you ever "get" the stone completely? The perspective I’m coming from here is object-oriented ontology. It starts from the idea that all objects are withdrawn. Objects are real. So the stone you hold in your hand is real. It does not only exist in your mind, or in your senses, or as a cultural construct. It’s also not just a collection of atoms or minerals. It is real and singular, a real stone. But at the same time it is withdrawn. You only ever experience it as appearances, which never reveal it in its entirety. Every appearance is only partial. An image of the stone is not the stone. A dream of the stone is not the stone. A scientific description of the stone is not the stone, and does not encompass its uniqueness. And because it is withdrawn, there is a kind of tension in the stone—a shimmering, buzzing tension between what the thing is and how it appears. In some way there is always “more stone.” The object is open, but also opaque. You can never exhaust it. In this sense it is infinite. And yet it is also bounded: you can hold it in your hand, it is made of a finite number of atoms. But even if you removed some of those atoms, it would still be the stone. You can destroy it, grind it into sand, melt it, even evaporate it with enough heat. But even then you will never get the stone in its fullness. It can die, disappear, but it cannot be exhausted by another object, or paraphrased, or subsumed, or completely grasped. So there is this central paradox, this rift in the stone — not inside the stone as if you could crack it open and see it, but between how the stone appears and what the stone is. And this is why the stone has the potential for magic. This practice is one way of experiencing that magical crack in the stone. It’s about authentic experience of the stone, about the encounter between the practitioner and the stone, about the field of appearance that springs up between two objects accessing one another. Authentic (or magical) experience is aware of and in line with basic ontological principles. Experiencing the world in this way ultimately means that you see this shimmer, this paradox, this rift in everything and everybody you encounter.