Writer who stumbled into typesetting and the occasional cover wrap. Founder of King Shot Press, a micropublisher of radical literature. Currently in Portland, but also sometimes Athens and elsewhere.
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MAY 16 2021: A Universal History of Ubiquity
Borges: “What we call chance is our ignorance of the complex machinery of causality.”
Borges: “What we call chance is our ignorance of the complex machinery of causality.”
Lately I’ve noticed that some realizations I’ve had have started bleeding over into the literature or art or even social feeds that I’m consuming, in a way that seems almost profound in the moment of discovery.
Take that Borges quote to the left as a recent example. It's a slice of digression from a larger point in the part about Dante in his Seven Nights lectures, which I’d just started reading. The night before picking up that particular book, I was having some beers with a friend and talking about the malleability of one’s reality through internal growth/change/will (call it manifestation or chance, whatever you want). We discussed our thoughts on how this works, how you can seemingly attract people or opportunities, how your past work can inform your future trajectory etc. And here comes Jorge with some adjacency to what we were grasping at, just tucked into his thoughts about the inferno.
So I texted my friend the passage after I’d read it, and she posited: “I think it’s that your awareness is heightened around those concepts so even if they [are] always close and accessible, they seem to become more recognizable/ubiquitous at the moment you’re most primed to receive them.”
This makes sense to me. That an already-present influence only seems auspicious because I’m in the right headspace to absorb it. That there are things like this around me all the time and I don’t notice them or I'm just not receptive. It strikes me as a very secular way of looking at magic.
The friend then pointed to a cliche: “When the student is ready the teacher appears.”
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about the past few days. How to be more receptive, to learn more, be a more perfect student.
Take that Borges quote to the left as a recent example. It's a slice of digression from a larger point in the part about Dante in his Seven Nights lectures, which I’d just started reading. The night before picking up that particular book, I was having some beers with a friend and talking about the malleability of one’s reality through internal growth/change/will (call it manifestation or chance, whatever you want). We discussed our thoughts on how this works, how you can seemingly attract people or opportunities, how your past work can inform your future trajectory etc. And here comes Jorge with some adjacency to what we were grasping at, just tucked into his thoughts about the inferno.
So I texted my friend the passage after I’d read it, and she posited: “I think it’s that your awareness is heightened around those concepts so even if they [are] always close and accessible, they seem to become more recognizable/ubiquitous at the moment you’re most primed to receive them.”
This makes sense to me. That an already-present influence only seems auspicious because I’m in the right headspace to absorb it. That there are things like this around me all the time and I don’t notice them or I'm just not receptive. It strikes me as a very secular way of looking at magic.
The friend then pointed to a cliche: “When the student is ready the teacher appears.”
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about the past few days. How to be more receptive, to learn more, be a more perfect student.