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Fox-Girl Legends

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 The composite oracle poster joining I Ching 64 and Tarot Major Arcana 17, prompted a search for fox-girl figures. Conductive inference moves through information, finding a path as it goes, more like crossing a stream with two stones, rather than building a bridge. It is a way but not a method. My juxtaposition  suggested there could be a hybrid joining the two beings, an intuition confirmed by a search, identifying an ancient legend and tradition of tales in Asian folklore of the Fox-Girl shapeshifter trickster character . Kitsune is a shapeshifting trickster fox woman from Japanese folklore whose character and personality resembles the crafty, playful, elusive, clever fox from the wild. She is a type of yōkai , a class of magical creature with paranormal powers. She often has two different sides: sometimes she is a benevolent deity associated with the gift of the rice harvest, while at other times, Kitsune is depicted as a demon or ghoul-like mischievous trickster who que...
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Beginnings (Wisdom)

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 Star and Fox  Continuing the synchronicity manifested in Moira , documenting the patterns of mystory, I checked a concordance to identify the I Ching hexagram corresponding with the Tarot Star card #17. That hexagram is #64, Beginnings , the final one in the sequence, the point at which the cycle begins again. There are various interpretations of this hexagram, but the basic wisdom is expressed in an animal tale: The young fox has nearly crossed the stream, but he has not yet escaped from the midst of the danger and calamity. The surperior man, in accordance with this, carefully discriminates among things and the positions they occupy.  Wei Chi  When a great project is almost completed, when the other bank of the flowing stream is nearly reached, the inexperienced fox becomes impatient and makes a dash for it. As if the relevance of this situation and its cautionary tale-- Not Yet --to my own position in life were not clear enough, it so happens that a few weeks pre...
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Aphorism: the Two Worlds

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"Kafka," by R. Crumb  To continue the theme from Nietzsche and Moira, the two worlds and how they relate (chance disrupting plans in the Dice Box aphorism). This theme is central to our project, organizing our introduction to electracy. Hannah Arendt provides a second example, based on a parable by Franz Kafka, "HE," from the Zurau Aphorisms. He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but also he himself, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment--and this it must be admitted would require a night darker than any night has ever been ye...
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Moira

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While we are discussing synchronicity, I should report another example in my own case of the retrospective loops and repetitions of time, an effect associated with fate, destiny, meaning. Perhaps part of what our inquiry is about is how one life and career more or less concluding offers lessons or paradigms from which younger generations might learn, at least to notice the kinds of patterns that might operate in their own projects. The question is how knowing such models in advance could be useful for directing one's own choices.   Daybreak , 130   I will discuss my recent remake of mystory in a separate thread. It updates Noon Star, itself a remake of the original Derrida at the Little Big Horn . In the remake I discovered the primary gesture unifying my Image of Wide Scope (IOWS) (terms and methods to be unpacked later). The gesture is the throw (throw down), blow, stroke, cut, all gathered in the term coup (in both its French and English usage). Researching coup, I t...
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Synchronicity

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 While we are following this thread of choragraphy, it is necessary to include some of the relevant theory.  A related theme is another fundamental lesson of my education, is that imagination is inscribed within an archival order (the Symbolic), a network of potential resonances and repetitions produced through synchronicity, the simultaneous atemporal existence of the historical record. Part of the project of choragraphy is to explore a logic of "conduction," a poetic practice that brings these heterogeneous materials into relation, to form constellations of potential meaning. A primary example in my own case is chora. Miles City Sand & Gravel Plant   Composing my first mystory in the mid-1980s, “Derrida at the Little Bighorn,” I discovered a match between Family and Career that produced an epiphany I have developed ever since. One of my first jobs when I worked at the plant was to clean the grids of the screens used to grade the gravel into sizes. Eventually the scr...
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Art Cartography

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Night , Composite Dream Map  Susan Hiller's Dream Mapping is just one example of the genre or mode of mapping appropriated by artists for expression, inquiry, invention, experiment. The "map" as one of the modes of annotation available for choragraphy. Hiller's example is collected in an anthology, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. by Katharine Harmon Map of the Internet  Kevin Kelly asked people to draw a map of the Internet, this being one example. This example is in a collection of artists' maps, Mapping it Out: Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartography , edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cinemap: North by Northwest  Alternative cartographies and maps of the imagination combine in "cinemaps," representing the mise en scene of movies.  In Andrew DeGraff,  Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies . Bambi , Infographics   Related to cinemaps are the infographic reductions of movies, as in the example of Bambi . These are ...
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ChorAgraphy ChorOgraphy

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View of Norwich    Chorography is a mapping, practiced at      least since the time of Ptolemy, combining features of geographical data and mimetic representation. One of its practical applications was to aid ship captains to identify seaports; also for overviews of townscapes. Choragraphy (with an A) is a recent innovation based on the collaboration of Jacques Derrida with the Architect Peter Eisenman, adopted for my updating of cogntive mapping, the mental geographies people create for way-finding (more later). Hundred Acre Woods  Children's books often include chorographies of the place or Umwelt of the world of the story, such as the Hundred Acre Woods of Winnie the Pooh . The importance of literature for developing imagination is that the scenographies of the Other World created in stories inform human fantasy with instructions for how and what to desire.  Uncle Remus, Song of the South  I still have the book of the Disney (controversial) ve...
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