Dear letterclub: I have been trying to (metaphorically) pen many letters over the past few months entitled things of more pretention and less, always intending to convey something and failing.
Some of my unpublished pieces’ titles, which will never see the light of day because they were 90% title and 10% trying and failing to justify a title that I thought indicated something cool:
- bowling without bumper rails, leaving the machine zone, and emerging
- “good shape”
- the paradox of secret design
- momentum: a post-mortem of acceleration and velocity
- prototyping & outlining
- then again, signifying nothing
- Energeia
Zeigfried: You orchestrated the meeting of myself and one Christopher Langmuir, and our interaction lead me to recognize and come to terms with my long-time disconnect with theory-speak. I like to get things done, and I worry that for example talking about haiku games is sort of antithetical to getting things done. Although I do value it, I want to find a way to integrate it into a practice.
Like, could I make a practice of making haiku games? I don’t know that talking about haiku games would get me to that place, I expect (and fear!) that trying to make a haiku game every day would bring the concept crashing down about my ears in an uninteresting way, that is, in a way that did not do much except prove to myself that I can’t make haiku games.
Uninteresting in the context of haiku game discourse.
Anyway, I wanted to share this poem. It came out in the course of thinking about process.
The image below is a screenshot of what Kinopio shows you every time you create a new space: a strong inspiration for these process-thoughts.
I had wanted to write “prototyping & outlining” on the topic which this poem is “about,” but I was not happy with prosing my thoughts, not happy with writing articles whose intention is to clearly lay out the facts. I don’t know the facts. But I do know how to catch one tiny feeling that floats along in the cloud.
Anyway, here is the poem I wrote, I hope you like it 🙂
mind map
ten or ten thousand points
connect a point with a line
arrange unruly swarms into
triangles, cubes, networks,
latticework becoming
overdeveloped structure
too busy to navigate
too laden with meaning
too dense to be read
start over having realized
past a half threshold notating
not-lines would be kinder
as connections form erasing
only indications of disconnect
slowly achieving what we started with in the first
ten or ten thousand points
no lines drawn between them
as quiet maps devoid of all dis-
harmonies have nothing left to say.
