Reading Change From A Turtle's Perspective

Deborah Yarock With Turtle

Deborah Yarock, MFT
Oakland, CA
(510) 214-6951
http://deborahyarockmft.com/contact/

Rilke: You must change your life
Foucault: You must change the way you think.

Foucault - Straddling the Abyss

The turtle carries all possessions around with it. 

It is inseparable from its shelter. 

The turtle lumbers on land and lays its eggs there. 

Then leaves them. 

Some get eaten, some hatch and then get eaten. 

Some make it to the water to swim, to live. 

On land the turtle survives. 

It is an ancient species that owes its longevity to its conservatism, its perfect inability to change. 

In this way it survives a thousand years, another thousand, and another and another, a very ancient species. 

The turtle does not change but it continues in its static life. 

It does not risk, it endures. It survives
but it does not live. 

It does not migrate far nor seek other lands that might be happier climes. 

It remains where it is until some impossibility forces it elsewhere.

And some people prefer to do the same.

Are you one of them?

Or do you want to change your life?

Do you want to change the way you think?

Do you want to challenge yourself, to risk what is sure with the unknown?

Are you possessed with the Nietzschean "will to know?"

Are you driven by this "will to know?"

This inner longing for Other?

Agnes Martin Painting - Grid;The Matrix

Cynthis Ozick wrote an article in The New Yorker once. She shocked by taking Otto Frank to task for causing his daughter Anne's death.

Because he had the means and the knowledge to get out of Europe in time.

Instead he moved his family into an attic, with their furniture and belongings

to set up the same life they had had.

Ozick says that he could not leave his bourgeois life

to flee into the unknown

so they all perished save himself. 

-Like the turtle he carried his possessions on his back- 

up the stairs to the attic

until flight to more hospitable climes became impossible,

and he could no longer even endure.

These are questions to be asked.

What are your answers?

The world is not continuous, progressive, historical. The world is ruled by EVENTS! Events come from nowhere. They are unpredictable. They cannot be anticipated. They surprise us. They have consequences, and these consequences have additional consequences. You cannot be prepared for Events. They just happen. 

Pearl Harbor

The death of a loved one.

9-11

The loss of your health.

Meeting someone you never expected to know and love.

An escape from Death.

And these moments of Kairos where your historical life and your Destiny cross will change your life.

Are you ready for them?

Can you welcome them?

Can you come out of your shell and embrace the Other?

Mark Tansey - Continental Divide
I once shared an office with someone who experimented on turtles. He kept them in a large tank.
One day I just stood and watched them swimming in the tank.
Their grace stunned me as they moved their legs and feet/hands waving them, circling, and they looked like birds flying in the sky. Effortless. Joyful. Just playing. Living. Weightless.

Freud: 

Play is the work of the child. Work is the play of the adult. 

Is this true for you?

Do you want it to be?

If you can imagine it, you can desire it.

If you can desire it, you can live it.

By Maria Spelterini
I'll Hold Your Hand

I'll be your balancing pole.

Security? Street Numbers; Zip Codes and 911 Reordering - Do You Feel Safe Now?

Agnes Martin Grid

With Numbers in Place: Security, Territory, and the Production of Calculable Space (2012) by Clare O'Farrell Rose-Redwood, Reuben (2012). "With Numbers in Place: Security, Territory, and the Production of Calculable Space". Annals of the Association of American Geographers , 102 (2), 295-319. Abstract Recent geographical scholarship on the politics of calculation has led to a reevaluation of the role of statistics, census-taking, and mapping as calculative techniques that have been of primary importance to the rise of the modern territorial state. The current study contributes to this literature by examining how the political technologies of street addressing have been employed to reconfigure the territory of the United States as a calculable space of security. Drawing on extensive archival research and thirty semistructured, in-depth interviews, this study provides a genealogy of calculable space, focusing particularly on the extension of city-style street addressing systems into rural communities to aid emergency management, homeland security, and various other governmental measures as part of the general process that Foucault (2007) has referred to as the "urbanization of the territory." As a case study, I consider the campaign to readdress rural areas in West Virginia to illustrate the social and political processes at work in remaking the territory into a space of calculation by encoding the landscape with a spatial regime of inscriptions. The results presented here show how 911 addressing systems have been central to the reorganization of political space at a time when the apparatuses of security are being "enhanced" by the apparent marvels of geospatial technology. To the extent that such technologies are themselves implicated in reshaping the very spaces that they are designed to represent, this study calls our attention to the pervasive role that spatial calculation plays in the production of a geo-coded world.