The Membrane, the Archive and Displacement
The membrane
Better known as the bubble. It is the permeable, semi-permeable or impermeable tissue that separates communities from their outside. These bubbles are sometimes overlapping. They lurch to engulf and retract to expel. They can also be personal, or, rather, individual. They enclose certain communities of thoughts and ideas and accumulate like minded thoughts and ideas from their outside over time. Personal bubbles tend to be self-reinforcing.
The membrane implies enclosure and isolation. The degree of a membrane’s permeability defines its evolutionary form. Those that “breathe” normally flourish from their outside’s influence but simultaneously maintain an “identity”. Hyperventilating membranal communities (as I type this, I realize how fond I am of that juxtaposition of words) over time become diluted by their outside while their protějšek are locked in feedback loops of questionable health.
The cost for an individual to be a part of a membranal community (I know this is a redundency, but the juxtaposition of words is delicious) is different depending on where that individual is on the axis:
nonpermeable <----- semi-permeable ------> tattered
One must always point themselves towards certain courtesies, ranges of thought patterns, behaviors, formalities (or lack thereof), foodstuffs, posture, belief systems, hygiene and goat worshiping practices when part of a membranal community, to some extent or other, or perhaps to no extent at all. As the plumpest humorist of our time sometimes tells me: There are RULES, vole.
The archive
Record keeping! Imagine that! Christian told me once, epochs prior to this moment that I sit on this couch scribing these words, around 2006 or so, that the only reason he owned the small, cheap, greasy digital camera that he held perpetually in his grubby paw was because he needed something to record the sequence of moments we were living through because otherwise he’d forget. The fact that we were sucking down cubic meters of beer every evening that wiped myriad details from our collective memory probably justified the camera, as well.
I wonder if he still has it. I suppose I could ask!
I’m not sure if I ever directly told him that it was something I could relate to deeply. Perhaps at that point he knew about my quotebook and about the extensive writing I did myself - an analogue to his camera. If I didn’t back then, I should have told him, yes, directly. In those dark days of Polo and evenings of jellied, pliable atmosphere sometimes chances to be earnest were skipped over.
In fact, that is what The Archive is, and, I should add, I’ve been reading through The Archive extensively during the last few days. It consists of the Martenblog. It consists of many other journal-like writings that have not been “published” on the internet. There are also reams of poems - far more than I have displayed on flavigula.net. I have emails and chat logs with people dating back to 1992, and not just of casual hey, let’s meet at Zarape’s and plan the deboning of the latest herd of goat-children sort of communications. Extended conversations about living deeply both intellectually and emotionally and ethical concerns of doing or not doing one, the other, both or neither are contained therein.
The Archive is an enlightening place to hang out and a portion of the last days during which I was, as I said, perusing the whole mostly unorganized heap of writing, I was considering an important question:
What shall I do with The Archive?
I think that the act itself of “faithful” (I laughingly call it faithful) record keeping is a form of ethical seriousness concerning the value of individual and collective existence. This may seem like an evident “truth”, but to do so as an individual about a single life that has been patterned by every interaction with another being that single life has encountered is not a small “feat”. It is momentous.
Displacement
I’ve tagged more martenblog posts than you or your stumpy uncle can shake an obelisk at with the word displacement than with any other term. It’s a concept that has both haunted and intrigued me since my early teens. There were a certain few turning points in those early adolescent years that gave me the impression and then convinced me completely that the mental or physical act of being unloosed from a fixed point (again, mentally or physically) that one could refer to as home base is preferable to the contrary. I’ll probably go into some of these turning points in the future, or I may already have done so to an extent. Who knows? Certainly not me, the writer of this filthy hadr.
Another way to look at this concept that I apparently hold so sacred is that what I call displacement is the state of permanent non-arrival. Yes, permanent. It is not a temporary condition at all. It is not a transition between two points of “stability”. It’s a perpetual cognitive, existential state that creates a distinct form of perception.
What kind of perception?, you ask.
Well, the kind of perception that I have, of course!
Can you please describe this so-called “distinct” perception?
No! I shall not! I’ve already elaborated multitudinous times. You are, at this moment, reading the collection of documents that contains these elaborations. Were I to choose a specific blog post, however, here would be a good start, especially the arrow / blunt object contrast.