A Mapping of The Mind on 11/9/2025
I’ve been here before.
4 - BEEN
handwriting things more frequently this month. Been trying to make sure I can still write things by hand, can still make things legible without a computer because a part of me things we may not have them a few units of time from now. I took a course on experimental writing with Ariel Chu and today I tried to put it into praxis/practice. I made a map knowing I do not think in maps, but knowing I would manage to fill it. I pictured myself on the black page and muttered I’ve been before and that was my anchor. Each word an unlikely invitation. I knew how things started, but not where things would. I do not know the proper orientation of this piece (ironic). I know where I started but when I try to collapse the partial pyramid into two dimensions I am not entirely sold on where I should start. I know what chronology dictates, but why do I need to be bound by linearity.
1 - I’VE
played a game with a friend once several lifetimes ago. We locked eyes and she asked me questions. Memories and idealizations, factual recall and basic arithmetic. Apparently, the eyes dart as the brain tries to fire the correct neurons. I’ve never played the game a second time. I have tried to replicated my habits (I did so on a train to Kansas City once), but observation and knowing changes the outcome. I played a different game once. It’s also a type of game you can only truly place once. It had no formal title, just a clickbait title of “How to get to know someone deeply” that I remembered years later to find this exercise about a desert, a garden, a cube, a horse, or at least it was something like that set. All I distinctively remember is my was mechanical in nature, a beast of burden made specifically to be a beast of burden, and I don’t remember what that meant about me.
2 - BEFORE
I ever looked into getting a Master of Science of Education, long before really, I remember in my junior year of high school, my AP World History teacher, Mr. Fisher was learning about pedagogy and had drawn a map of all the different learning methods and practices. Years, nearly decades really, I still have the vague imprint of this mental map. I do not think in continuous space and region. I ascribe to discrete schema, the structure, file paths, and folders. I think in reference and markup, embedded links, and pointers. You ever think about how sometimes you get lucky? That happenstance had your back and you managed to find the nicest niche, a space only could fill. Do ever think about space? The vastness of it all. What is and what is not. Inherent contradiction. Complimentary causation.
3 - HERE
is an infinite canvas made finite. Scott McCloud in Making Comics or Understanding Comics introduced me to the concept of an infinite canvas. How in digital space, space is theoretically infinite. His unfinished comic, The Perfect Number, illustrated that. Each panel had every other panel embedded. you’d click to zoom in and go deeper, much like the protagonist’s own obsession. The infinite is inherently terrifying. Humanity does not do well with the indefinite, or definitely large for that matter either. I think a lot about the fact i do not think in panels. You would think as someone good with the discrete would be or at least willing to, but I think more in fractals. I think more in cyclical repetition. I think in measuring coastlines and getting lost tracing the outlines of grains of sand. Everything is an hour glass if you think about it. Every body keeps track of time one way or another.