no2self.net

Dear Reader,

I enclose some letters between Matt Webb and I that we both feel are worth sharing. Topics include: meditation, breathing, Arthur Dent, puffing sacks, giving form to that which you know intuitively, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and the gentle hum of radiators.

In a wonderfully self-fulfilling way, writing this has itself given a form to something I only knew through intuition until yesterday.

And yes, I’m sticking to the word letters because somehow the truth (e-mails) seems depressingly cold for a topic such as this. They deserved a typewriter with an old ribbon, a failing key or two and reassuringly thick paper. Diagrams in the margin drawn with a fountain pen.

On 24 Nov 2005, at 23.50, Rob Annable wrote:

Dear Matt,

Great entry on meditation. I too find myself unable to put aside the short chunks of time meditation deserves, but you’ve encouraged me to try harder.

Some advice that I’ve read elsewhere that you may find useful….

Concentrate on your breathing by imagining the point on your body at which the air enters and leaves – the tip of your nose. By focusing on a specific thing you can push all other things/distractions out of your mind. Count each breath but give yourself a system to structure your counting better – only go from 1 to 10 and then start over, make yourself start again if your mind wanders.

Then soon the tip of your nose will become forgotten as you concentrate on your breath. Then, perhaps, your breath will become forgotten as you concentrate on your trajectory, as you call it. A gap appears between you and your body. You realise that the body is perfectly capable of breathing on your own while you go off and do other things. Try not to laugh with delight. Once it becomes automatic, etc, etc.

Arthur Dent learns to fly by forgetting to hit the ground. It’s a bit like that. Perhaps the dressing gown is important.

I may have a book somewhere, what’s your address?

Regards,

Rob

On 25 Nov 2005 at 12:07:54 Matt Webb wrote:

Hi Rob,

It’s a curious thing. The more I talk to new friends, the more of them I find have been meditating daily for many years.

I tried for 10 minutes this morning, taking the advice you mention. The first paragraph is the easy bit.. I didn’t even get close to the second. It seems like that experience of suddenly seeing will be the way it happens, though.

I would be interested in a book, if you find it, thanks! If not, I can look it up if you remember the title.

best
Matt

On 29 Nov 2005, at 0.54, Rob Annable wrote:

‘…My body is a bellows, an automatically moving, rhythmically puffing sack…’

That’s it. You’ve nailed it. I’ve never read such a fitting description.

Sorry if my previous description of the counting/breathing process was a little tricksy.

I’ve returned to practice myself and it’s no surprise to find that I’m completely out of touch with the process. I shall have to start again.

Your comment about the puffing sack got me thinking about new ways to look at the problem. I think it’s got something to do with distance and the new found perspective this gives. Counting your breaths gives the process a formal structure. A topography that you can observe objectively. By observing it you step away from it.

It reminds me of something I once stuck on everything2.com when I used to mooch about there a little (before I had a blog to bore everyone with):

‘In my experience, the moments of greatest clarity come when you read or are told something you already knew intuitively. Something that you’ve never had either the experience or need to formalize in your mind before. By being shown old words in a new order, you’re intuition takes shape and becomes recognisable as a form that you can hold up against others like it.’

We’re formalizing the breathing process in order to put it aside. We can pigeon-hole it now that we know what it is. It’s become a thing whose form we could hold up against other things in order to categorise it. In your case, a puffing sack.

I used to find it quite useful to try meditating in front of an open fire. Not because of some hippyesque notion of the power of fire, rather as a subtle way of locating myself in the room during the process. It’s about simple stages: I allow the feeling of heat and the quiet sounds of the fire to help me picture, categorise and then put aside my actual physical position; I count my breaths to allow me to distance my mind from my body; I empty my mind in a way that Dan Ackroyd must have wished he was capable of when he accidently conjured up the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Room-(fireplace)-body-(breathing)-me.

The fireplace and the breathing are simple tools to help me reduce the topography of the room and my body to something more manageable that I can pack away.

The book I was thinking of is a book on Buddhism. I was confusing it with a web page on meditation I read some years ago which I no longer have the address for. It’s a good book though and you’re welcome to it if you want it – Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor.

I don’t think I’d be too worried about recording your thoughts on this journey. Like you, I’ve never been keen to have a teacher for meditation, but perhaps you could look upon your blog as somewhere in between. Writing this has certainly been useful for me. If you don’t mind I may blog some of our correspondence myself.

Apologies for using two sci-fi comedy references in as many e-mails.

Regards,

Rob

p.s – I’m pleased to see Peter has been able to help, he and I were talking a little about Buddhism a few weeks ago and promised to pick it up again soon. You’ve reminded me to do so.

On 29 Nov 2005, at 18:29:28 Matt Webb wrote:

Your point about formal structure is completely it. I was thinking the same thing yesterday, but didn’t write it up last night because I wasn’t sure how to express it.

Please do write this up on your weblog (and feel free to quote from any of our emails) because I’d like to point to it :)

This morning, there was a gap in my mind apart from the counting and the breathing, and it was being filled with random thoughts. I filled it with the hum of the radiator, and that did the job. Hardly your open fire, but near enough.

best
Matt

ps. cheers for the book recommendation. I’ll look it up I think, but thanks for the offer!

Regular, substantial entries have been thin on the ground lately for a number of reasons. One of which is the time I’ve been investing in a side project along with my friends Stephen and Matthew. This one is really just for people who live in my city.

We have finally gone live with a project we’ve been threatening to get off the ground for months – the Wolverhampton Freecycle initiative. Here’s the site:

wolvesfreecycle.org.uk

For anyone new to the freecycle idea (it’s been up and running in the US since May 2003 and there are plenty of other UK groups) it’s about swapping and giving away stuff you no longer need rather than letting it become landfill. You post to a mailing list stating whether you are offering something or if you want a particular thing and hopefully you’ll be able to hook up with someone locally to get/give what you want.

Freecycle groups are primarily run using Yahoo groups but we’ve decided to have a separate front page and offer a little more. We’re experimenting with the cool new way you can get del.icio.us to spit out your latest bookmarks – check out the bottom of our site…

So, no excuses, I expect to see all of you (who live near me) signed up and feverishly giving stuff away. We’re hoping to get a bit of PR done on the radio and local papers soon so that we can achieve a critical mass of people to get it really moving.

If you don’t live near me, unlucky, but please, do me a favour and link us up on your blogs.

Life is a wonderful business, though fools blow up London tube stations and sell each other crap and waste time with gossip about movie stars. If you can draw, you will always have a place to go that is beautiful and honest and true. As you sit in an airport you will find pleasure in the folds of a crumpled lunch bag. As you bide your time in a doctor’s waiting room, you will find peace in the arrangement of the shadows on the wall. Even without putting ink on paper, you will be able to slip in to Drawing Mind.

The point is not what your lines look like or how accurate your crosshatching might be.
The point is not the drawings on the page or the pages in the book.
The point is not the opinions of others who love/hate/ignore those lines you made on the page.
The point is not the money you make selling your work to galleries or publishers.
The point of practicing your craft is not to rise in the rankings of those who draw. It’s not to have your style dominate (sorry, Dan!).
The point is to more easily gain acces to the moment, to the deeper more peaceful recesses of your Self.
The point is to live as well and as fully as you can today, right now, whether your pen is in your hand or not.
The point is to See and to Be.

Danny Gregory

Those of you who are avid listeners to Radio Stoke (hundreds of you, I’m sure) will have already heard me talk about a photography competition I’ve been running with some school kids in Stoke-on-Trent. Last week we presented the prizes and the radio station sent a reporter along. I had my computer set to record the internet stream, but mercifully (for you) it choked while I was away from my desk, so you’ll have to find some other way to hear my dulcit tones.

It was a big success, so I’m keen to share it here too. Here’s one of the entries:

The rest can be viewed on the project web site I put together.

It’s a part of a few different methods of enquiry we’re using to develop a clear path towards some urban regeneration proposals. The output on this project provides several different benefits; the kids begin to feel some ownership of the problems and become more interested in a solution; they drag apathetic family members with them; we get a view from a different age group than would normally attend standard consultation events; images allow the kids to project their concerns more effectively than they might do with the written word.

We’ve also had a text messaging project running in a nearby neighbourhood but to my surprise it’s been a complete failure and had no interest. Next time I’m going to bring these two ideas together into one project…

*edit: I should also point out that all these fantastic pictures were taken with single-use disposable cameras

related: Entry number 42 over at angermann.com: Maps made by hand.

Walking through the square a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about the snippets of information/fabrications that you overhear as you walk through a city. Sounds approaching, passing and receding as you flâneurificate about town.

What’s a flâneur? Webster defines it simply as “an idle man-about-town,” one of those fin-de-siècle dandies who ambled through the crowds of European cities in search of bustle, gossip, and beauty.

In the tradition of literary flâneurs—Walt Whitman, Fran Lebowitz, Alfred Kazin, Joseph Mitchell, the Beastie Boys—Flâneurr seeks to scrutinize the city, to evoke the essence of the street. And to encourage flaneurial behavior, whether detached observation or decadent gadding about.

(from the flanifesto)

Over lunch I caught a few sounds as they passed with the butterfly net of my mobile phone. Relationships, stories of consumption, waste, car insurance costs. Tiny, tiny cogs in a big, big machine. An idea began to form.

Last night I was reading up on podcasting and enclosure tags.

And then this morning, rummaging through Anne Galloway’s del.icio.us inbox I found this site by Brian House:

__placing voices__

Voices of strangers heard in passing are key threads in the fabric of urban experience, subconsciously coloring our perception of a place. Yet such features are inherently unrepeatable, unique to every individual’s listening experience, and, unlike a photograph, the location of a recording is difficult to recognize. ‘Placing Voices’ is a mobile-sound-blog software which uses the built-in sound recording feature of mobile phones (which is optimized for voice) and MMS messaging to place these fragments on a web-accessible map of the city as they occur. The objective is to express a map in terms of these experiences, to restore some claim to my memory of physical spaces over the transient voices heard within them.

Note to self: move quicker.

The important move here that I – if left to my own devices to progress a similar project – might have missed, is the use of the map. Crucially, a hand-drawn map. I’m reminded of the cognitive mapping research by Moar.

This requires subjects to either produce a sketch map of the area of interest or estimate distances between key points, which the researcher can then use to build up a map representing their image of their area. This technique was used, for example, by Moar¹ to show that housewives in Glasgow and in Cambridge had very different mental maps of the British Isles.

(from Applying Psychology in the Environment – apologies for the dodgy image, only had my phonecam to hand, click on it for the flickr notes)

Tha map of Manhattan on the placing voices site looks fairly accurate though and I’d be interested to know if Brian drew it from memory or traced/copied it. However, this assessment is based on my memory of Manhattan and I was only there once in 1994 for twelve hours, six of which I slept through, so who knows where the truth lies? I’m too lazy to Google for it let alone reach for the atlas on the shelf. Truth is the very last thing on the agenda here.

Eavesdropping on someone else’s links seem to be a perfectly fitting way to have discovered this site. I use the inbox option on del.icio.us and subscribe to a few peoples linklogs, subsequently/lazily subscribing to the net results myself with bloglines.com. I noticed recently that someone else is subscribed to my inbox too; gathering the links that I gather from others. This is both the height of laziness and super smart efficiency, but then that’s a pretty good definition of RSS as a whole.

notes:
1. Moar, I. (1978) Mental triangulation and the nature of internal representations of space.

I was reluctant to upload this entry; partly because it uses a quote from What Is Architecture? which will also be included in a future write up I’m working on, but also because I’m in danger of looking like I’m on the payroll at Icon magazine, since this is the third item I’ve lifted from its pages in the last few weeks.

I can’t resist – you know how much I enjoy confluences of events and ideas. First, whilst making notes on Paul Shepheard’s What Is Architecture? on the tram this morning, I took down his comments about camouflage.

Those stealth bombers are not painted black to evoke menace, or to disappear into the night: this is ablative black. The paint is full of ferrite particles that absorb radar energy and make the machines harder for the other side’s radar to see.

It’s difficult to see how character survives in such an environment. Here’s an example: the big black submarines that cruise under the Atlantic Ocean are invisible, and apparently anonymous. But throughout the life of the machine, the hull picks up dents and scratches exclusive to itself, and consequently the sonar signature of each machine is slightly different. It acquires character through use.

I was struck by the common ground between us on the subject of character. Upon arriving at work I was greeted by my shiny new copy of Icon. Inside is an interview with Maarten Baas about a project of his called Smoke.

Smoke has its roots in a conceptual project he embarked on while at college. “I was thinking about beauty and perfection,” he explains. “When we talk about perfection [in design] we normally think about things that are smooth and symmetrical. Yet we call nature perfect, although a landscape of rocks is not smooth and symmetrical at all. How come we like that as well? If you have a scratch on your car you want to polish it away. But don’t scratches make a product richer? Or if something breaks off, isn’t this new shape also a perfect shape?

Smoke involves the burning, charring and disfiguring of furniture, which is then resealed with resin and sold again. The images of iconic furniture engulfed in flames are worryingly compelling.

Of error the house

to mobius,
a berkel van file.
Mp3, mvrdv,
an configuration line.

Ben flaxwood,
achaea studio,
un design.

Sap
and bittorrent calcs.

Webstat poetry. The top 25 search keywords for this site. Order unadjusted but punctuation added at my own discretion.

Your turn.

I got beat by Mikey. It’s probably well deserved, as his entry is a great photo.

There’s a collection of the entries on the Sony website.

I’ve just submitted my entries to the Ericsson ‘Fourteen Days‘ competition. You can see them by clicking here (mine are the ones that say ‘posted by eversion’ on them).

My opening gambit:

It begins. I catalogued the first 14.

A series of 14 photos, one taken per day during the very first 14 days of my moblogging career. Some you will have seen before on my own page, others will be new; both in image and underlying story. I shall be exposing a little more of my life than I usually do.

All were taken with an Ericsson T610.