abjectal interbeing

A kind of librarian spell from 2015. An unintended achievement: I managed to attach the word INTERBEING on the computer screen so the word floated across the library catalog, my blogg and ended up in the strait between Helsingborg and Helsingör.

I had been looking into, bending open the wor(l)d INTERBEING since it corresponds well with my favorite word; the ABJECT, that I read as a rejection of the subject's enclosure and the object's still life (nature morte)... the abject, the unifying splitting...

Thich Nhat Hanh, a vietnamese Zen buddhist monk uses the word INTERBEING as an approximation of the vietnamese tiep hien. It means to be in touch with the reality of the world while continuing on the Buddha's path of enlightenment, to realize and make real in the here-and-now world.

That the word ended up in a map of the strait, Öresund and Helsingborg where I was born, made me associate to this quote by Jeanette Winterson:

On the day I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.

The screen hopping word could be seen as a sign and I jumped further with the philosophizing geographer Gunnar Olsson and his book Abysmal: A Critique of cartographic reason:

"The sign is a map, a weaving together of picture and narrative, a power-filled statement which tells me both where I am and where I should go, indicative and imperative in the same breath. Squeezed into its own minimum the map is a double fold, verb turned to noun, noun to verb... and in my understanding the most forbidden of everything forbidden is that which refuses to be categorized, that which is neither this nor that, ungraspable forces which do not sit still but hop capriciously about. Aristoteles consequently knew what he did, when he between the two concepts of identity and difference inserted a third position called 'the excluded middle', a non-bridgeable gap which in the same figure unites and separates, liberates and imprisons, an unruly space located beyond the realm of conventional reason; a no man's land of liminality which the well behaved must never enter..."

Rethinking this today and since I am not well behaved, I did and do somersaults in the gap, in the abject, in the interbeing, in the included middle, mapping "IT" in-and-out, and folding myself into another corner of a map, by another strait where I was born, Mycale, and where I will be going very soon...

Images Julie Morstad