The Invincible America Assembly Speaks
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks had a tough week with the Dow Jones
Industrial Average suffering its worst one-week point drop in five
years, but a group of meditators promise their good vibrations will
send the index past 17,000 within a year.
A group called the Invincible America Assembly made that claim and more on Friday, insisting they have America's prosperity under control and their positive vibes will bring fewer hurricanes and better U.S.-North Korean relations.
Through group transcendental meditation the assembly -- which has 1,800 people meditating daily in Iowa since it was formed in July 2006 -- releases harmonious waves which benefit all aspects of U.S. life, spokesman Bob Roth told Reuters.
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I'd like to try transcendental meditation at some point, but I'm not sure I buy in to their idea that simply radiating good energy and thinking good thought is enough to make meaningful change in the world.
"No thoughts but in things" - William Carlos Williams.
I'm living at Elsewhere still, for those of you following this at home, wherever that may happen to be. I'm really in to life here, and am planning on staying as late in to the Fall as I can. I'll lord over furniture to support myself, tending bars and waiting tables, and am looking in to tutoring kids on the SAT. Whatever it takes. I'm like crazy busy all the time, and as a firm realist and introvert the incredibly dynamic dream-like & social nature of this place is both rewarding and something that leads me to take lots of naps. So for those of you who I owe correspondence- patience, forgiveness, I beg of you, I'll be sending you such lovely presents.
Elsewhere has many things, as previously noted, but also of note is that they move around; today brought with it an eruption of space, a movement of architecture that has been static for four years. Nothing is stable here, as nothing is truly stable anywhere, but here the instability takes place at a much faster rate. Things are created and then quickly reintegrated in to the jumble of the space. It's a living work of art, and it takes place over time; it's less a gallery as architecture holding discrete works as a performance of collection, archival, grouping, cleaning, furniture moving, conceptual play, gossip, complete and utter mania. This may sound fussy to those readers who are used to the idea of art as things that are crafted, beautiful, distinct, and sold, but almost nothing is for sale here except a couple buttons, and I haven't seen much else quite like it.
It's kind of a stretch, but I find myself thinking of this gig as a somewhat monastic experience. Removed from the rest of the world to devote one's self to a calling that is both fully composed of this world and apart from the world while living in a community devoted to a common calling, not to mention the chastity & poverty. The crowd here is pretty entangled with the world, gloriously descended and decadent, but I don't think monasticism should automatically be equated with asceticism, as anybody who's sampled a fine Trappist ale can tell you.
My meditation practice here has expanded dramatically, just out of dire need for negative space. The roof is a very important space for me here, as it's the one place that is painted white and doesn't have crap everywhere. I make a wall study every night and most mornings. Though my spiritual life exists and my rituals are important to me, there's nothing particularly religious about all this. It's just that a mindfulness practice is a personal move towards personal sanity, and anybody else who'd like to come is invited. I find that if I can successfully think about breath and nothing else for twenty minutes in the morning, it makes it far easier to choose what I think about for the rest of the day, and end up being in control of my own brain in spite of the onslaught of stimuli demanding dynamic attention.
What else to say? My to-do list runneth over, the people here are an incredible inspiration w/r/t how to live a life that doesn't involve much office work, I'm learning oodles about non-traditional curation and spatial manipulation, I'm averaging 1.5 gigabytes of photography a week which brings me back to highschool yearbook levels of photographic productivity (college made me lazy), everything is filthy, my life is full, I'd love to hear from you.
Sires of stakes winners and stakes-placed runners for 1968
Big Joy- Hookum
Condiment- Some Smoke
Dark Ruler- Crack Ruler
Degage- Foreign Comet
Dumpty Humpty- Applicator
Hidden Treasure- Golden Garter
Jaddo- Gaddo
Knockmealdown- G.G. Knock
Never Give In- Tuffit Out
Point of Order- Order Me now, Pointmenow
Red God- Sinking Spring
Run For Nurse- Run Rita Run
Wooden Nickel- Lum Puckeroo
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination," wrote Anaïs Nin. "Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." I share Nin's perspective, Taurus; I know from experience how maddeningly slow the truth-gathering process can be. But I'm pleased to inform you that you're in a phase when missing puzzle pieces will become available at a faster rate than usual. Be alert for the subtle onslaught."
The books in my previous note were dispersed through the library before I managed to get them on a shelf with a sign saying "poetry section." Rats. But now my intent is dispersed through the library, much as the complete works of Borges (minus proper nouns) can be found in a Spanish language dictionary to those who are patient enough to engage in the xerox/scisors/paste process for their well-deserved illuminations.
I made a poem.
Found on David's desk after he left today.
Because everything at Elsewhere except the roof is bracketed by this sort of thing.
"...then we would see the beauty of the young, which it is traditional to admire- their unlined features, their unworn flesh- for what it is: merely an incipient form of life, and nothing to emulate. One view of the young body is as an ideal. The other is as an unpressed blank. The young are beautiful, but they are stupid."
-Mark Greif, Harpers, Nov. 2006
So I've been at Elsewhere for about a week. Above all else, this place is dense. It is a hallucination of detail. There are many things.
Objects function in a tricky way at elsewhere. Everything can be viewed as both a whole and a part of the larger whole, and this organizational structure goes infinitely up and infinitely down. We can break 1950's kids toys here down to their constituent atoms, which themselves have subatoms, and the entirety of the space exists in Greensboro, which exists in a quirky little corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Since they discourage destruction of objects here, as well as importing of new objects, most stuff that gets made here comes from making wholes with histories unto their own into parts of something larger.
In other words, this is both an archive and a museum and an artists space, but more than anything else this place is built on the assumption that objects have lives that are as worthy of our energy as the lives of the people. We make friends and enemies here. It's a sort of meet and greet or cocktail lounge for things and the people who love them, a Tupperware party of sorts. Objects are not utilitarian here; they are here to live their life to the fullest, between their birth and death. They are in process, there is no end, there is no final state, there are only moments in process that can be frozen for later study with words, photographs, video, sound, and other similar memory containers. Unlike a museum, everything changes. Rather than taking the usual archival tack of fighting decay, we embrace it and encourage the fluidity of material existence to flow in magical ways.
I'm here for about six week's worth of pumping this firehose of visual information in to the teacup of my mind. And then after that, I'm gonna find an open field, a window.
