acyborgkitty

[acyborgkitty]

Uncommon Measure

Prelude

“A future event”—the act of recording their observations—“causes the [atom] to decide its past.”

"Writing the book of linear time changes our reading of the past—if not the events themselves, then at least their meaning, our sense of how they happened and why."

"...our subconscious minds are constantly at work rewriting time in the margins of our memories, coaxing narrative out of chronology, temporal order out of time's chaos. In the act of recording ,writing, remembering, we chart our stories onto a particular path... Writing thus distorts our sense of our own time, but it also orients us in it and helps us give it meaning."

"Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of it's passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form."

"embodied time"

"Carlo Rovelli ... in The Order of Time: that 'the mystery of time is ultimately, perhaps, more about ourselves than about the cosmos.'"

Untrainment

"Every piece of music has a time of its own, one that the musician needs to enter in order to perform it."

"Rondos have the mesmerizing effect of moving you linearly and circularly through time, at the same time..."

"Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events."

"a simple phrase or a complex form becomes a temporal object: time molded in order to manipulate emotion, putting you through the changes of the present only to bring you back to the past, locating you in a moment that is simultaneously familiar and wholly new."

"Duration is not time—"

"There's a term for that interplay of stretch and compression: rubato, literally the 'robbing of time.'"

"A piece of music is a multidimensional entity, a creation molded from time's clay."

"entrainment, the ability to synchronize the body's movements with a beat..."

"auditory cortex, located in the temporal lobe near the center of each of the brain's hemispheres..."

"Rhythm engenders movement, and movement in turn becomes rhythm."

"It is through entrainment at all temporal levels that music allows us to break out of the quotidian rhythms of day-to-day time—"

"Speech—which, like music, connects sounds in time to express emotion and create meaning—has its own performed element, predictive yet improvisatory: You think as you speak, your words have to keep up with your thoughts in time."

"...communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others."

"The uncanny ability to entrain one's own body to a beat translates into the equally uncanny ability to sync one's movements with the movement of tohers."

*entangled*

"synchronize" "fugue"

"time; but not time as the ticking by of moments only, or as passage only, but as an entirety, a whole moment made up of little moments connected seamlessly to one another"

"a shape of time, a sphere suspended in the dark continuum of memory, an entity that held. Every moment was constantly being added to the next; neither past nor future existed, only a continuous present."

A Sixth Sense: Notes on Improvisation

"not only the notes but the tone, articulation, dynamics, and character with which those notes are to be played."

"...the feeling of easy self-suspension that in the best moments can accompany deep focus, the way that when you have to throw yourself into a task it becomes almost a way to abandon the self, almost a relief to leave the self behind."

"unfurling present"

"'using learned patterns to create new patterns' in what the study authors call ' a form of embodied creativity.' ... embodied cognition"

"instantaneous, prescient memory—of remembering the future, as it were—has a strange, surprising corollary in the natural world, in the universe's order of things. It's called the path integral, and it occurs in the realm of quantum mechanics: ... the path integral calculates the probability that a given particle, occupying one position at a particular time, will end up at another position at a later time."

"the very formation of human memory inevitably increases the entropy of the universe"

"The drug of improvisation ... seems to open up associative pathways along which the self is given permission to disintegrate..."

"...the simultaneity of time embodied by the path integral, whereby a partical traverses freely the terrain of past, present, future, and renders those boundaries meaningless."

"time in the quantum universe, where realtiy and possibility exist simultaneously and where past, present, and future are one—"

"Time exists as narrative; memory, too, is not only entropic but improvisatory."

"Time renders most individual moments meaningless, or at least less important than they originally seemed, but it is only through the passage of time that life aquires its meaning."

"To create is indeed to remember; to remember is to involve oneself in a universe of feeling, to fold time in on itself until it can contain itself no longer."

Symmetry Unfolding

"the work of love lays bare the infirmity of the divide between past and future, self and other, you and me."

"symmetry describes the relationship of a single identity to itself. Every personal identity is an entity in flux, a constant negotiation of the multitude of more specific identities that it comprises and their myriad proportions to one another. ... Each of us has the capacity to become a slightly different person, depending on where we are and whom we are with, in any given moment of interaction. The balance of who we are is determined by the symmetries and asymmetries of thos identites, the relationship, forged by their interplay, between how others see us and how we see ourselves."

"In physics, a symmetry is defined as the preservation of a system under a given transformation: the replcaement of particles with their oppositely charged antiparticles, say, or the inversion of their orientation in a space so that right is swapped with left and vice versa. ... If they do not, the system's continuity is ruptured in a process known as 'symmetry breaking.'"

"moving across the world in order to begin life anew necessitates undergoing a monumental translation in space and language and time, a transcontinental shift from there to here, then to now. You are required to change yourself, to break symmetry with the past and with the person you used to be; in many cases, perhaps, the desire for such a break motivates immigration itself."

"The fact that systems, people, memories can be symmetrically translated in time doesn't alter the fundamental asymmetry of time itself, whereby a known and immutable past plunges headlong into an uncertain future, one where we will be haunted both by what we have done, and what we have left undone.

Implicit in time's asymmetry, then, is the notion of becoming. The universe unspools itself toward a state of higher entroy; its edges fray..."

"'becoming' ... must involve itself in the increasing disorder of the universe."

"She knows you haven't been able to write for a long time. There's always other, more immediate, more self-erasing work to be done."

Chaconne

"counterpoint—that is, with a multiplicity of simultaneous independent lines, so that no one voice is privileged too long over the others."

"not of linear stages but iterative, circular variations, different feelings and memories buried within one antoher."

"memory—that most universal and yet individual of temporal structures—lends form and shape to experience in biographical time. We inhabit simultaneous, concentric timescales: the time line of the past coiled withing the immediacy of the present moment unfolding. Memory creates a metonymic congruence between them, melding past with present in such a way that our former selves move forward with us in time. But grief ruptures that momentum."

"all the gravitational aspects of grief"

"You don't move on from loss so much as move away, further out in time."

"To grieve is to experience these painfully expanded moments over and over again, often without warning ... to think you've gotten away from the past only to awaken to it, to get the wind knocked out of you all over againn, to feel the omnipresence of that loss."

"When I play it's a way of inhabiting again, even for a moment, the person I once was."

"If D minor is darkness, then D major is light; it shares the minor's grandeur but not its sadness. It is radient, ebullient, sparkling, full of life."

"the way you can be taken out of grief, even momentarily, by something beautiful:"

The Still Point of the Turning World

"Today, some physicists believe that any given particle 'is entangled with many particles far outside our horizon.'"

"coincidence: the unpredictable synchronicity of two beings in time."

"Each moment melts like an individual snowflake and yet is replaced, simultaneously, by another which is wholly different and equally beautiful, so that you inhabit a present that is continuous and yet made up of individual moments falling and faintly falling, the drifted accumulation of the past."

"To improvise with others, then, is to experience something more than the infinite subjectivity of time: It is to know that those individual subjectivities can be unified."

"In short, it's entanglement: the certainty of simultaneity, the eternal acto f creation in the infinite we are."

"...we didn't exist in time, but, rather, time lived in us."

"...the terrifying prospect that if time is so subjective then we are necessarily alone in our unique experience of it."

Coda: Memory is a Hologram

"Time, or at least our perception of its passage, is too complicated a subject to examine from either a humanistic or a scientific angle alone. Each needs the other, points inevitably toward the other."

"whose only boundary is 'the infinite future.'"

"'according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history.'" (Hawking and Mlodinow, Scientific American)

"This is also what makes writing frightening, at least to my mind: the fact that it can change the past so effortlessly, and solidify that change into reality."

[acyborgkitty]

Meeting the Universe Halfway

Preface and Acknowledgements

"To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather individuals emerge through and as part of their intra-relating."

"...time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future."

"Memory does not reside in the folds of individual brains; rather, memory is the enfoldings of space-time-matter written into the universe, or better, the enfolded articulations of the universe in its mattering."

"Remembering and re-cognizing do not take care of, or satisfy, or in any other way reduce one's responsibilities; rather, like all intra-actions, they extend the entaglements and responsibilities of which one is a part. The past is never finished. ... we neer leave it and it never leaves us behind."

"...nor is writing a process that any individual 'I' or even group of 'I's' can claim credit for." *citational lineage*

"('intra-actively' rather than the usual 'interactively' since writing is not a unidirectional practice of creation that flows from author to page, but rather the practice of writing is an iterative and mutually constitutive working out, and reworking, of 'book' and 'author')."

"entanglements are not isolated binary coproductions..."

"Justice, which entails acknowledgment, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting."

"How to understand what is entailed in the practice of meeting that might help keep the possibilitiy of justice alive in a world that seems to thrive on death?"

"Mattering and its possibilities and impossibilities for justice are integral parts of the universe in its becoming; an invitation to live justly is written into the very matter of being,"

"The yearning for justice, a yearning larger than any individual or sets of individuals, is the driving force behind this work, which is therefore necessarily about our connections and responsbilities to one another--that is, entaglements."

"...the living and changing phenomenon that rightly deserves teh name 'book,' which is surely not the simple object one can hold in one's hands."

"diffraction patterns that seemed to inevitably emerge during our conversations."

[acyborgkitty]

Recieving a gift by mail in Finland (sent from outside of Finland):

Someone sent you a package! How nice! A gift! Maybe it's your birthday!

You get an email saying you have a letter in OmaPosti.

You log in to OmaPosti using email address and password.

Then you can download the letter.

The letter is only in Finnish and Swedish. You have to translate it using Google translate if you don't read these languages.

The letter instructs you to go to the Customs website where you have to:

log in using your bank identification.

You then have to fill out an online form that asks for:

the tracking number, contents, and value of the package. (Too bad if it's a surprise!)

Then you get to another form where you have to tell them when it arrived in Finland. (Usually that information is in the letter, but not always.)

If the information you've entered matches the information they already have in the system from the customs declaration that the sender filled out:

You eventually get another email, this time from Customs, saying you have a decision on your declaration.

You then must log back into the Customos website with your bank identification to see the decision.

If they decided you have done everything right, you will then eventually get your package delivered by Posti.

If not, then you are asked to provide a reciept or invoice for the price of the contents.

You obviously don't have this, so you have to ask the sender to send it to you by email.

You then submit the receipt for the gift to Customs and pay the 24% VAT on the gift.

Then you have to go back to Posti and pay a "handling fee" for them to deliver it to you.

Congratulations, now 14 - 19 steps later you get your gift!

Recieving a gift by mail in every other country I've lived in:

Someone sent you a package! How nice! A gift! Maybe it's your birthday!

The package is delivered to your address.

How is it where you live?

[acyborgkitty]

New Scientist, 5 April 2025

"IN CHINA, it is known as “the lonely disease”. The Japanese term translates as “intentionally shut”."

"Genetic studies strongly indicate multiple differences in brain development between autistic and non-autistic brains,..."

"We also have a powerful drive to be social – a need to join or be accepted by social networks – which can underpin many aspects of behaviour."

"As many as 80 per cent of autistic girls remain undiagnosed by the age of 18."

"One study, for example, found that autistic girls had higher activity in areas associated with social reward than autistic boys – and even neurotypical girls – pointing to higher than usual levels of social motivation."

"Masking may seem like a successful trick. But, in fact, camouflaging in autistic girls and women is associated with high levels of anxiety, exhaustion and stress, as well as chronic depression and suicidal ideation."

[acyborgkitty]

New Scientist 26 April 25

"The “intertidal” of his title is defined as “the part of the shoreline that appears during low tide and is hidden during high tide”, an area between land and ocean. Such transition zones are often populated with abundant life and diverse species." p. 28

"Individual organisms die, but life as a whole is far older than most rocks on the surface of Earth." 

"For instance, a bird’s wing implicitly contains lots of information about aerodynamics and Earth’s atmosphere." p. 36

[acyborgkitty]

"As such, Pietri makes an explicit parallel between Palestine and Puerto Rico. One is a place inhabited by a people whose claims of national sovereignty are ignored and invalidated by imperial forces while the other is peopled with those who lack sovereignty over their homeland because they are a U.S. colony (5). In both cases, the ideological concept of Israel as a promised land is central in the rhetoric deployed in mainstream U.S. and Israeli culture to construct a myth that justifies the colonization necessary to establish a home, a nation-state, and an identity for the occupying culture and population. This, of course, is done at the expense of erasing, silencing, and displacing the histories, voices, and bodies of those colonized, in this case the Palestinian and Puerto Rican people."

[acyborgkitty]

"My privilege now is to walk ME’s city of stolen futures alongside many people"

[acyborgkitty]

"I’m not a pacifist. Though I want peace I want everyone’s - not just my own. So, I’m willing to fight for peace. I also know that’s a paradox and that’s when I understand that revolution can only be sustained through revolutionary love — and this love can only be accessed through devotion, a love for the planet and her people is what guides me these days."

[acyborgkitty]

"While some students are able to do the complicated and courageous self-advocacy work it takes to communicate with medical providers, university administrators, and numerous college professors (many of whom have very little familiarity with disability or medical conditions), far too many students have undoubtedly been dissuaded. In fact, as much as two-thirds of college students with disabilities have not alerted their campus of their condition(s) (see Dolmage, 2017)."

[acyborgkitty]

I just got back to Finland and am trying to restart all the services I had before. Being disabled and an immigrant makes everything three times harder. I called the number for the PA service on Monday and she said I had to talk to a social worker first but wouldn't give me the phone number to call. She said she'd ask someone to call me. Today is Friday and no call so I thought I'd try to find the number myself. Can't google it because I don't speak Finnish well enough yet so tried googling "Raasepori social worker" in English and found a website for Rasepoori city services. Called and she at first refused to speak English with me but eventually switched (her English was perfect!) And gave me another phone number to call. Called that one, for western Nyland Health services I think. Got someone who also refused English at first and then eventually switched when we ran through my Finnish in one sentence. She said she would text me another phone number to call. But I'm autistic and my quota for phone energy is already gone for today so ... Either I risk meltdown by pushing myself further or give up today and make the next series of these phone calls Monday.

As always I want to be clear that I love Finland and love living here and love the services in one had access to that are way better than the US. But it is so hard to access things as an immigrant. And my partner isn't able to help me and I ask my friends already for a lot of help so I'd like to do some things myself.

[acyborgkitty]

"The Sidewalk of High Art" by Miguel Algarín, introduction to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

"Lifting the details of the terrain into the poem reveals the self and shows how the land explains the self to the poet. ... Here the politics of land and people are one, as the poet reinvents the self through the history of the terrain. ... The land is concrete information that feeds the body and the soul and reveals the future." p. 12

"...the great commitment that the poets at the Cafe have made to writing the verse on the page and then lifting off the page into performing action..." p. 19

[acyborgkitty]

"To cut into the immediate moment and deliver an image of what is going on and then move on so that the next image is fresh and alert to the ever-changing present is the business of the poet." (p. 181)

"Once the qualities of the space in which we live are defined by the poets, the next step for communicating meaning is to establish the action of the poem." (p. 181)

"Once the common ground and the action of the poem are established, then what the poem becomes is the event of itself. The poem makes you pay attention, makes you care. It is the moment that imprints a cultural presence upon the world." (p. 182)

Miguel Algarín, "Afterword" from Nuyorican Poetry ed. Miguel Algarín & Miguel Piñero.

[acyborgkitty]

"The poet's right to define his words is his tool, his knife." (p. 24)

"The impulse to create a language that can absorb aggression without fantasy thrives among people who are in situations of extremities." (p. 24)

Miguel Algarín, "Part I: Outlaw Poetry" from Nuyorican Poetry ed. Miguel Algarín & Miguel Piñero.

[acyborgkitty]

"The poet is responsible for inventing newness. The newness needs words, words never heard before or used before. The poet has to invent a new language, a new tradition of communication." (p.9)

"The poet blazes a path of fire for the self. He juggles with words. He lives risking each moment." (p. 10)

"Poetry is the full act of naming." (p. 10)

"Communities are united by small actions that return the law to the people and inspire them to trust each other." (p. 13)

"Language and action are simultaneous realities. Actions create the need for verbal expression. If the action is new so must the words that express it come through as new. Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York has caused a new language to grow: Nuyorican." (p. 15)

"There is at the edge of every empire a linguistic explosion that results from the many multilingual tribes that collect around wealth and power." (p. 15)

"Nuyorican is full of muscular expression. It is a language full of short pulsating rhythms that manifest the unrelenting strain that the Nuyorican experiences." (p. 16)

"Language breaks down easily between institutions and those laying claims on change and newfound strength." (p. 16)

"A new day needs a new language or else the day becomes a repetition of yesterday. Invention is not always a straightening up of things. Oftentimes the newness disrupts. It causes chaos. Two languages coexisting in your head as modes of expression can either strengthen alertness or cause confusion." (p. 18)

"Around existing, formally recognized languages who empires of rules grow. Rules and regulations about speech are conventions that grow (at first) as patterns of self-expression which becomes fixed in usage—so that as all of the rules and regulations that spring from street usage become established patterns, a body of "grammatical rules" will correspondingly evolve. The evolution of a grammar is slow and at first always a suspicious process for two reasons. The first ist hat a language that grows out of street experience is dynamic and erratic. There are no boundaries around it." (p. 19)

"It takes time to have disruptive, tense, informal street talk arrive at an organized respectability. Nuyorican is at its birth. English nouns function as verbs. Spanish verbs function as adjectives. Spanish and English words are made to serve the tenses of existence. Raw life needs raw verbs and raw nouns to express the action and to name the quality of experience." (p. 19)

"...we will sit and talk of our newness and how to shape it." (p. 19)

Miguel Algarín, "Introduction: Nuyorican Language" from Nuyorican Poetry ed. Miguel Algarín & Miguel Piñero.

[acyborgkitty]

[acyborgkitty]

“Poetry was thus regarded as, in the celebrated phrase of the Spanish poet Gabriel Celaya that Guajana made its own, “a weapon loaded with the future.’”

Puerto Rican Poetry ed. Roberto Márquez, p. 263

[acyborgkitty]

"Nature doesn't just exist in fractals, it also moves in fractals. In nature, processes create change in fractal ways. ... Nothing that's living is fixed or finished. All is constantly emerging. ... Our heart rates are always fluctuating in a fractal process. Laid out in a graph over time the fluctuations of a heart rate look similar to the fluctuations of a coastline, canyons, or mountain ranges. "

The healing magic of forest bathing