HITS & MISSES, FITS & KISSES: Let’s agree not to run into each other, but won’t you let us take us for a ride? GAME FOR A COLLABORATION WITH US ON OUR EPIC QUIXOTIC QUEST?
The trans-dimensional runner of this quixotic life has at any one time one foot on the ground, pragmatic/rational/grounded in sturdily hardcore realism, and the other airborne, in cuckoo land and blue skies, with extra-terrestrial visionary eyes on each (swollen) toe, taken with skyscraper-tall mountains of heartattacky salt.
In this Web 2.0 Do-It-With-Others storytelling exercise, we have been privileged to have undertaken several collaborations with you, in our quest for the Meaning of Life 3.0. Here is an other idea for a collaboration (first conceived in early 2010):
As it is, we have not met 99.782 per cent of you, given that our interaction has been only in Life 2.0, ie, via the channels of this running blog, Facebook, Youtube, GPSies, Twitter and so on – and our imagination, of course. Also, given that we are partly an imaginary creation, meeting in real life is possibly an unimaginable task. (That said, we do not think that encounter in one dimension is of lesser or more significance than an other) In this idea of a project, to make the point that we want to maintain or create a critical distance between us, let us go out of our way to deliberately not meet in Life 1.0. The way to go about doing this is that one person shares her routine over a prescribed period of time. The other person – let us call them the/an ‘anti-stalker’ – will journey on the same route, but intentionally missing the previous person, by a few minutes/moments/metres/centimetres.
The thrill/beauty/cruelty/point of the game is to come so very close to have nearly met – but to just stop short of actually encountering the other. Afterwards, the pair could compare their GPS tracks and find out and plot, point by point, by exactly how much they have missed each other. (And of course, this sharing can be done remotely). As a consequence, one or both parties can derive (perverse / poetic) pleasure from the fact that they could theoretically have been in the same time and space, and could have had an encounter, but willfully and precisely do not. The deliberate orchestration of a denial of a run-in is the point of this project. Hence, we will never come face to face and whisper ‘Hi!’, ‘Nice to meet you!’, ‘Nice to meet you again!’, ‘And who are you?’; one may come close enough to catch a whiff of the other, or sneak a peek of the other’s shadow, or catch a dying footprint, but / and that is about it.
The game can be more fun if more participate. An orgy, not of presence, but absence, with participants who are missing – although we will hardly miss one another.
The great thing about this project is that it is of course hardly original, as many of us are already accomplished practitioners in some degree or an other, but, my Dear Conspirators of Pleasure, do you not think that it will be infinitely (more) enjoyable should we make this a studied and planned collaboration/game, with set parameters to play?
So, are you game? (Ah, the wonders of technology, to allow us to indulge, stretch and realise such fantasies…)
** Currently #5 in the War of Films contest: CLAUDIA TOMAZ’S film about KAIDIE AND HER MEANING OF LIFE 3.0. VOTE NOW!** Vote by clicking on + sign at the top of video player. ** Don’t forget to vote for Episode 2, Run Kaidie Run, too!**
Jim
I think this might have gone without saying but now you’ve said it! As soon as I know my course is diverted and I get drawn to things I didn’t think of or things I’d forgotten about already. Not intentionally, though sometimes yes, more in a drifty sort of way. A recipe, a road, both very similar things. Kaidie as strange attractor. And before Kaidie was born, Kai took a long time to get to Suomenlinna, knowing that I’d already been there and was waiting for her to catch up, and probably she was not as hung over as I was that morning, or plain beaten up as I was, and you probably had an email account by then too. Eric Bloodaxe would have killed me if it hadn’t been for my magnificent wee brother. I’d forgotten the place existed or even what I was doing there or what happened. And that was nothing to do with the drink just time lurching around dropping things. Oh sleep, sleep, sleep on memory foam of all things, next thing I’ll be believing in ghostees!
Aug 22, 2010 @ 00:28
Lucy Natarajan
Er, dear Kailives, I feel I am already playing your game, bumping into your friends and stepping on ghosts of your past here in Singapore. This nearly-shared experience, long-distance togetherness, unparticipation or whatever you want to call it is kindof cruel but I’m starting to think that absence brings pseudo-celebrity status…my new Singaporean friends feel they “should” know you, the Bartlettes read my work on a UCL PhD grapevine portal, and my family has become strangely fascinated in mundane details of my daily life like what I can buy at the supermarket. Just goes to prove that the heart is a strange creature responding so positively to absence, craving the greener grass of exotic other places and impervious to such practical notions as distance, time and space. Lucy
Aug 24, 2010 @ 02:12
3rdlifekaidie
Hello Lucy!
Its great that we are already playing this game! Apart from stepping on ghosts of pasts, there is also a higher occurence of actually meeting, ‘bumping into-s’, overlaps, and shared histories in a small city-state and island-nation like Singapore. I suppose the chances of this happening is less, in larger cities like London ( – which is large enough to accomodate other versions, including Nondon), NYC and Tokyo, which is also precisely what pulls me to them.
Indeed absence is a powerful emotion/mode of operation, as imagination patches in the gaps, the ellipses, and in so doing we are active (and not passive) in a different, perhaps more interesting way…
Fortunately, as it were, we DID meet in Life 1.0, in Nondon – if so briefly – before we swopped places! 🙂
Please enjoy the encounters and re-encounters on my behalf!
xx
Kaidie
Aug 25, 2010 @ 14:08
3rdlifekaidie
Hello James,
This sounds like a pas de deux, like a Bach counterpoint responding to a point, consciously or subconsciously, for us and our ghosts, ghostees, ghostesses of this and other worlds and lives! While we could have left cookie trails in a previous age, we are now making digital marks and leaving digital signs, that trigger off what we had experienced/known… As it is, we met on Life 2.0 (in [the evil] Facebook, specifically), but if we had not met at all, would we have been conscious of these crossovers?
Warmest regards
Kai(die)
Aug 25, 2010 @ 14:37
Majei
Hi Kaidie,
Didn’t we met some time in the not-nothingness? You were between events, and I think I was walking on the other side. By the way, I read your thesis chapter, which I thought revealed all sorts of interesting possibilities. I am still floating around up here, I think I need some information about the in-between. Can you try to crack a code: it’s in Steiner, G. ‘Grammars of creation’ (LITERATURE A 23 STE, pages 116-120).
Majei
Aug 25, 2010 @ 18:00
3rdlifekaidie
Hi Majei
Thank you so much for your note- and the lead about Steiner! We must crack that code!! I really like what Adam Philip points out, ‘art, for Steiner, is at once our grand inquisitor and the best way life has come up with of justifying itself – is “attended by a two-fold shadow: that of its own possible or preferable inexistence, and that of its disappearance” ‘, which sounds teasingly evocative! … And thank you for reading our thesis-manifesto! It is great to hear that there are possibilities of where it could go. And when you were ‘walking at the other side’, was it the wild side like Lou’s?
Warmest regards
Kai(die)
Aug 29, 2010 @ 23:46
Jim
And so it is, though I have an easier dance with Kai(Die) than Kai(Die) has with the world(s) she inhabits, I think I’d fall over my feet and bruise my knees too if I danced that pas de beaucoup, beaucoup, beaucoup. Or maybe Kai(Die) is a prima ballerina lifting the corp de ballet to new, dizzying (!) heights, with her flighty, flights of fancy and all her exclamations and all their marks. Fancy, French Fancy(!), bringing me back to food, the cookies, the breadcrumb trails eaten by the birds so that we can’t find our way back to where we came from, even if we wanted to and sometimes I fancy that Kai(Die) is the bird eating the cookie trail that she’s laid her self now that she enjoys her short life in the forest so much and where else would she want to live except in a forest? How is she going to get out? How many days left does she have to live in the Forest of Nondon? I forget. It is five forty four in the morning and the Cities of the Plain are rising to my East and to the South of me as the sun comes up. I have a new recipe for a cake (carrot and ginger in a ring from Italy). I think I’ll bake now so the folk all wake up to the smell of freshly baked cake, luxury of luxury, breakfast of breakfast, hot coffee and cake, bliss of bliss. Have a great day Kai(Die), and run, Kai(Die) run!!!
Sep 01, 2010 @ 05:48
3rdlifekaidie
Dear James,
Indeed we are the birds in this partially cock-&-bull Web 2.0 tail, munching cookies, humble pies and imaginations of Italian carrot-ginger rings!! What bliss indeed, we cannot ask for more. Indeed Kaidie ran and didn’t die (yet)! THANK YOU so much James for all your support thus far that has helped sustained and nourished our runs and imagination. With some 700 days remaining in our lives in the Forest of Nondon, bake, James bake!!
x
Kaidie
Sep 23, 2010 @ 21:07