The unending possibilities of new explorations

 Something online talked about a film director moonlighting as a delivery driver.
And some people seem to have unusual hobbies, and time to focus on unusual things, sometimes unnecessarily.
That's all we want.
That's what I want around us: mysteries of hard-to-understand time spent, with the possibility of enlightenment. People to focus on aspects of the world far from commercial products. People doing things we don't expect, motivated by rarity--the interesting function of strangeness.
I want everyone to deviate from the norm in their own selfish obstinate ways.
An ocean of dreamers walking like zombies.
An incineration of material considerations.
Desires of pastures new, static expeditions of weekend explorers. The vision of a thousand reasonable amateurs, ploughing their ways through a materialist world.
People should find ways to mix their obscure interests with their work. Making work obscure, going through tunnels to find new territories. 

Another one, a what, a text, a quote of Marginalian, a piece

 Sensation of unknown
The need to create new dreams toward a mysterious future
Need to feed the dreams by working on its elements, as it doesn't come free
Need to work, build
Construct the elements one at a time, each providing its own energy
Cathedral of dream-powering-powers, dreamy items, like a garden.
Attention as a form of prayer: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/19/simone-weil-attention-gravity-and-grace/
But there is work within attention, and prayer, there is concentration that builds attention, and work that feeds concentration, like a virtuous snake. A constance to go back to it. Go back, and back.

From knowing to being an amoeba

 A text written from hard mental work goes from A to Z through a series of events that have lived through episodes of torture and progress. Some kind of feeling of completion happens once reaching Z, a sense of logical continuity throughout, at least enough of it, a sense of having reached some desired state from which no backwards movement seem necessary.
 The next day, reading one's work and finding errors in the logic, missing links in some parts of the chain or holes within key nodes, is one of the most terribly humbling experience. No matter the amount of satisfaction and inner harmony reached the day before, a guarantee exist from divine powers that a first draft will need to be changed, about half of it at least. 
 This sense of having found new ideas, or corrections to make, is a sort of time repetition in reverse: it is the assurance that time will surely move forward, it is like another proof for time gravity, pushing us one document version after the next. It is not however an infinite loop. Something happens through rewriting a draft which prompts us to stop. Another sense of completion? It can be. As in mystery movies, no assurance is given. The ways of the divine are inscrutable. Hence writing is both a certitude at first (of having to rewrite a draft) but becomes an invisible ambiguous state with unclear boundaries at some undefined point, in which we typically already think of other topics, other texts to be written, without realising we are forgoing examining the original text another time.
 Until later, sometimes much later, when forced to return to it, the Nth version that seemingly satisfied us enough. At this point, it may be that we get trapped in this intangible ambiguity again, without recognizing it. The trap has been set, forever, and we know not whether to do anything, we are victims of a too well-oiled machinery we helped to compose. In that way, writing is self-entrapment, but the writing was on the first wall, and we had seen it. 

 If any thinking whatsoever is similar to this kind of writing, from A to Z in hard and complex ways, transforming from doubts to satisfaction to self-blame and self-praise and surprise and repeat, until reaching an amoeba, an unknown state of "ok"-ness, if any thinking happens this way, there is something akin to universal laws of physics/dynamics in these dances.     

Hiking § continuous adaptation

About changing directions, continuously adapting to a changing environment. Remembrance of this:

This ever so strange sailing maneuver called hiking. Boats and life aren't best sailed upright, in a calm and perpendicular manner to an average flat mass of wavy water, as our intuition draws for us. There are unnatural tensions applied for the best course, and sometimes that best course demands to appear outside of oneself, of the boat, pulling it in inhuman manners, close to the surface. Often the best course demands a curve, facing the wind head on for a while, a giant boomerang effect like a spacecraft nearing a planet fast enough to virtually ricochet towards uncanny speeds. Life curved routes and acrobatic handling of our ropes rarely appear in the open, we see others in their perpendicular steady ways, or at least believe so, as they may perceive us in identical distorted ways, misidentifying our trajectory and misrepresenting how we learnt to direct our life-ship. Struggling to get from A to B can be harder when it seems others do it easily, linearly. There are poetics, physics, music, and economy in being a human-pilot. The many ways in which best adjustments to situations go against our natural instincts and intuition need to be written down, they really should be, for being a proper human requires chasing and acquiring what seemed unnatural at first, as steadiness requires adaptive bending, and transitions force us to reconcile distant corners. Wavering, finding new moving patterns, distortion, gliding. Meditations on life movements.

THE GEOMETRY & POETICS OF LETTERS

Most Typography works are focused on the practical and aesthetic representation of letters, the letters as drawn on paper or on electronic support, the letters drawn with width and blackness. I am interested in the geometric architecture of letters themselves, the letters taken as clear, abstract structures, as geometric constructs.

My aim is not to build a font nor to get a better understanding of existing or potential writing tools and techniques. I want to celebrate the beauty of an "H", the simplicity of an "O", look at how similar "n and "u" are, abstractly, geometrically.  From this, I believe a lot of conceptual, abstract and quite scientific work can be done on the subject, that can feed back as conceptual groundings for typography, to enrich our understanding of language, and possibly enhance language itself. 

I would suggest the following topics:

1. The definition of abstract letter shapes: 

1. Historical considerations: typography is an after-the-fact human endeavour, going from a de facto state of in-use alphabets to a conceptual practice 

2. Practical approaches: extracting wireframes of most used fonts, computing their averages, considerations on variance

2. Geometric analysis of letter abstract shapes: 

1. Length of path: e.g. an "i" is short, an "W" is long

2. Complexity measures: e.g. "o" is the simplest, "g" is the most complex

3. Differences ("distance") between shapes: e.g. "p" and "q" are close to each other, far from "m"

4. Symmetry groups

5. Decomposition into basic elements: 

1. Different approaches: e.g. cutting down to individual curves, or keeping multi-segments shapes together. Neural network / pattern recognition considerations.

2. Statistical analysis of micro-shapes: e.g. distribution of elements (how much vertical segments compared to curves)

3. Psychological considerations: brain responses to elemental shapes (micro-legibility), then to letters themselves (standard legibility), then to words (readability)

4. Physiological (Laryngology), Musical, Onomatopeic considerations - relationship between muscles, voice, sound, and shape

5. Semantics considerations of shapes (micro- and macro-): e.g. meanings of circles, vertical segments,..etc.

6. Aesthetic considerations of shapes (micro- and macro-): 

1. by themselves: aesthetic homogeneity of the alphabet. Exceptions and black ducks

2. in words: why do some words look better than others? do letters work well together, aesthetically? 

7. Reflections on non-western alphabets

8. Towards an objective measure of letters, and a redesign of the Western alphabet.

9. Appendix: extra reflections: the poetry of shapes, advanced semiology,..etc.

POETICS OF LETTERS:

B

•  Transformed:

• Rotated left 90: a double arch with pedestal. A greek Mc Donalds. Double gothic round entrances.

• Rotated right 90: a bar, with 2 loose lines hanging.

Possible concept: the mental force

 Idea of a mental force: the force, intensity, energy, felt from the mind by its inner working: can be towards a conscious objective, e.g. solving a puzzle, when we feel powered-up and are impressed by our own speed in progressing towards one or multiple resolutions, or it can be without a clear objective, such as when inspired by a dream or a vision, and we feel our mind deeply occupied, busy, in that state. It can also happen when thinking in multiple directions, when multi-tasking. The mental force may happen on its own, stemming usually from simply "feeling good", supported by additional causes, or we may believe that it can come from our own volition, self-discipline. Many certainly have that belief, such as teachers. It seems like some have a natural ability to obtain a constant mental force (and often a solid set of fixed domains) such as scientific types, while most have a default minimal force and no consciousness in raising it up.  Yet one could lower theirs while the others should also be able to increase theirs, it's natural, Mental force must be partially in control of our power. It's the seeming invisibility of the methods to raise it up that are a problem, something for future centuries to discover. 

Worrylessness

Worrylessness

phenomena only appearing in that state

ecstasy and voluptuousness

places Time in a motionless form

every item gets full attention

concentration becomes so easy, so fluid

Gestalt - everywhere

Feeling time and space as our body

deeper level of kinesthesia

breathing becomes the only action - Buddhism may get it wrong, asking to focus on breathing first, values need to be inverted, the therapy is opposite: focus on actions and deliver yourself from life first, then breathing comes naturally - meditation is the (artificial) simulation of that state. (but we live through simulations - chicken and egg problem)

Or 

worrlylessness as falling into a pit by (almost actively) living a relief, relief as the act of issues disappearing, watching the disappearance and feeling muscle un-tensing

active meditation