B Part Renaissance day seven nightfall

←daybreak

What else is life for? Is this a kõan? Not quite. Kõan-like in a western kind of way that begs a reasonable answer - rather than the riddle of a kõan. What it does share with the kõan is the non-necessity of an answer. I did get to work today, I didn't get to the Port for sunset. Failure as a virtue. This is quite a virtuous project, probably useless to deflect charges of endurance and heroics. I'm going to tell you what Avital Ronell wrote about kõans instead ("…designed to provoke doubt and shake attachments, the koan slows things down."). And when I've done that I'll upload some images we took from headquarters last night. Contingency measures come in handy, tonight the contingent operation is c o m p r o m i s e - what one can't know is a continual process of negotiation, it isn't consensus, ever. (This project could also be called a resistance to the tyrannic scroll of blogs, though the element of testimony is still here I resist I tell you, resist! Nothing I write is useful.)

Passive and constricted, one is responsible for one's kõan, which is always related to a public space of notice or inscription. Kõan, which comes from ko, "public," "public announcement," and an, "matter," "material for thought," involves extreme manipulations of exposure. Tremendous feats of rigorous nothingness are accomplished with intractible discretion. Kõan is a matter of responding thoughtfully beyond thinking to the call of a master's question - the logically unsolvable riddle - in a manner that, becoming public, exposes the student to the outer limit of (not-) knowing. Neither the students nor the master can be said to possess knowledge.
Avital Ronell, Test Drive "Trial Runs" 2005 p. 119

My kõan then, for the rest of this trial run are the three images above - poodle, woolstore appatures, painted-white tree stump.