Instructions:

1. Use a separate piece of paper to answer the questions where required.
2. You have nine hours (three hours/day for three days) to process the whole workshop.
3. After you know how to read, if you want something to read, you can communicate with us.

When we read, what do we want to read and why do we want to read it? We want to read so that if there is anything offensive to our sensibilities in our environment, we remain aware or it. We want to read because we want to know when we are cursed and we want to know what the curse says. When we devise a strategy for our wider mode of behaviour, we need to know which are the biases and which is the ill-will that is already working against us. So when we are trying to figure out how to read, we are obviously not talking about just reading text. Text is oriented towards being read. The interesting thing to do then is to make text less readable, less flat, less accessible. Writing is about this act of encoding as well as about the act of burying within the text itself, all the tools to decrypt it.

We are talking about reading situations; reading that which has not been rendered in a readable format.

Summary:

Reading involves the recognition of symbols and the translation of these symbols in a standard way to yield a set of sounds or a meaning. But sometimes things are not as simple as that. The situation is exposed in a way that requires the subject to search for clues, find a pattern, synthesise a translation template, perform a translation and come upon a meaning simultaneously. Learning how to do this, requires a specific effort. Language has limited our ability to read. This workshop module will introduce the frameworks required to be able to read spontaneously.

Once we are able to do that, the curse will become a universal mode of communication again. The format will get its teeth back again. It will even have fangs and so a sting. Wouldn't that be lovely?

For us, a constant source of regret and disappointment is that eventually everything gets blunted and exhausted. All the potency of language is only timely and contextual.

But this workshop will trace a return-path for us.

The workshop will help us read.

Not just read texts to supposedly know their intent. But learn to read the texts that have never been read before.

Outline:

This is a three day workshop. Participants are required to commit three hours on each day. Within the span of the nine hour workshop, we will be able to meet our objectives.

Day 1: What's your word?

Hour 1: Pick one word that speaks for you, your narrative as well as your sensibilities. Speak this word aloud for one hour and record it. Upload the recording on Soundcloud, send us a link. We will put it all together and share back.

Hour 2: You can only identify strongly and squarely with something accidentally. You can never strategize the script of your own identity. To shuffle it up, which other word could possibly speak for some version of you? Can you imagine at least one other version of your own persona? Maybe, if we are going after versions, the word that you could select could be from a language that is totally foreign to you.

Hour 3: The inherent bias in a word between its possible meaning and non-meaning can be broken. This bias can be broken by not choosing a word on the basis of how it is heard. A certain haste, an urge to gamble can be at play. Think back of everything that you have read. Think of a word that you have no understanding of, and easily misread or misinterpret.

Day 2: Understand friction: protect, encode, sharpen

Hour 4: Friction exists between the transitions between words. This friction is the source of meaning that language projects. Identify this friction and develop it further. We need to be able to calibrate the friction as needed. Write one line of text about who you seem to be on a piece of paper. Mark the points of friction with another color. Upload an image of this sheet of paper on Dropbox, share a link with us.

Hour 5: Friction is a parameter of movement. While you are not moving, this friction needs to be protected so that it does not get exhausted. You can protect the inherent friction in your linguistic constructions, by encoding them. This encoding is done by giving up direct access to everything. A code is evolved that refers to all entities in a surreptitious manner. Machines are made for the decryption of such codes and these machines use the code as their natural language. The objective is to hide the map of triggers, hide the relationship between friction and language. If this relationship is known, we become very simple targets of manipulation. Tell us the story of the yellow sparrow.

Hour 6: How do sharpeners work? Sharpeners shave away a layer of the pencil with a blade and so they sharpen by doing away with the exhausted and dull parts of the shell. We will sharpen your language, why are you here?

Day 3: What do you see? See nothing at all.

Hour 7: Seeing nothing is difficult, but it is the key entry point towards beginning to read. Once nothing is on our visual horizon, our senses are not confounded and our buffer is not trying desperately to catch up. Once we have nothing to see, we are forced to read. All our reading happens in a dark room. Can you transport yourself to a dark room without changing your location at all? And can you tell me that story?

Hour 8: Losing focus of what is already filling our scope of vision is difficult. But that is what we must do. The screen is not going to turn off, in order to be here and also manage to read and process the text at the same time, we must learn to lose focus. The motivation, the channelling of our angst into sequences of production, the measurement of our ambition through the granularity of our actions all need to be forgotten and dismissed. Can you tell us one thing that you have managed to forget?

Hour 9: Refresh your vision. You can only really see anything, if you fully attend to it. To fully commit your attention to something, you must be able to access your attention in some way. If you are already fully invested in the world you are living in, how can you access any of your resources anymore. So, first you have to cultivate a dispassionate engagement with the world. You need to be superficially involved. The hooks that the world extends and wants to sink into you, only need to be able to enter your skin. Outside your own narrative, what comes across as pure noise to you? How can you see something without engaging with it as potentially meaningful content? Describe the experience of reading this text through the language and context of drinking a cup of cold coffee.

1. Mark a target. A strong target. Look around, identify and write down the name of one element in your environment that you want to bring down.
2. Having a weak target diffuses your wrath. Does the element that you identified in (1.) trigger your irrationality?
3. If you are able to inflict whatever you desire on your target, what will you inflict?
4. Pause for a moment. Think of how you will be relieved when you are through with your target.
5. Now inflict the universe within which your world exists to the response that you came up with in (3.). It is a very basic rule of struggle, you can't ever reach your target. You need to broaden your frame.
6. Make this infliction your mantra and your sole act. Acts are suited for repetition. Repetition is the only surety that actors have. If you something many times, at least once you will get it right.
7. But the target. Who is your target? How did you arrive at it? Finding your target is the single most significant thing you will do in your life. State your case in one sentence.
8. Your target is where you want to go. You will never get there, but the desire to get there will exist in your mind. We want to deal with that desire.
9. Your target is mapping your orientation. You will never be freed from the set of polarised coordinates that you place yourself in. Why is your target so important that you are prepared to perpetually enslave yourself?
10. Your target is giving yourself a name. You are not your name but your name is your handle, it is the surface on which time will deposit itself. Without a name you cannot refer to history.

A vision of the future is always supposed to be positive and inspiring. This imagination can also be bleak. In fact it is often bleak. Often the only insight that any of us have into the future is that it is undeniably screwed. This insight into the instability of the future, is a good motivation to tinker with the constituents of the present. To change what we already have a bad feeling about. But the actor does not want anything the change. She cannot. The director forbids her from deviating too much from the script.

But also is difficult to be unbiased, openminded and hopeful when the overbearing inside does not match. It is not possible to project when there is no feeling. So the actor lies. The actor communicates far and wide that the vision that she has inside is extremely luminous, that all her dreams are fragrant with hope and she has no nightmares anyway.

The actor lies to placate everyone and diffuse the possible motivation to fundamentally change the system.

This lie works on the peoples of this world. But it has no way of working on the actual tangents of time. When the future arrives; the future advertised as a bastion of good tidings and a positive turn; the actor just says that she got it wrong and actually finds a few factors to blame for the way events have turned out. This deception is the story of how we constantly fail and how failure is not an accident but our operating model.

We fail because we need to know what we are constructing, when we are performing the labour of construction. We cannot walk blindly. We need to engage in significant action. A scripted and directed construction is more likely to work than a spontaneous release anyway. We are unable to display foresight when we are engaging in random play anyway. We are not able to strategise the eruptions that come forth through us.

So we have to come to terms with the lie or have a way to speaking the truth while still following the script.

The curse allows us to do that.

The curse wishes for a bad end for the cursed.

But the end is going to be bad only. It is not going to be pleasant for anyone. We are all equally doomed.

So our curse is a truth selectively revealed to someone for whom we do not hold the warmest of feelings. We are kind to our object of derision. Once we do that, the object of our derision ignores the curse and attempts to surround herself with enough charms to offset the effects of our curse. The object mistakes the curse to be a spell. But it is only a prediction. A foretelling. It is inevitable.

The object's fear and repulsion of the curse changes the script. And this change sets the cycle in motion.

We push seeds into the ground and we must dig them out when the time is right. We excavate only because we are fixated on ideas of who we are and how we dig ourselves into the landscape. The self cannot be accessed. Only the narratives of the self that we propagate into the world can be accessed. These propagated narratives are like the seeds sown into the soil. The fix us into a specific instance of the dynamism around us.

To be as fluid as we are behind the trappings of the narratives that we project, we need to excavate ourselves from all the points of fixation that construct our narrative. This excavation will then allow us to feel genuine anger as we will no longer be invested in the world.

Feeling anger is about divesting ourselves from the landscape that belongs to the world. Once we are sufficiently divested from the landscape, our seething anger can take multiple forms. We can feel free to lash out as we please. A scream, a shout, a curse, a act of unprovoked aggression against the state are all allowed.

What does it take to curse? At a base minimum, it requires us to think of ourselves as a separate unit than rest of the world. This distinctness allows us to be fearless. We do not imagine that we wish for the other will also apply to us. A curse ss a kind of action that is equally a self-infliction as it is an act of aggression. There is no distinctness to be experienced. We are all inexorably intertwined with each other. To curse, a sufficient provocation is needed that is so strong that we are prepared to suffer harm because we want to inflict harm so badly.

Summoning the anger requires us to divest and to curse in a potent manner requires us to be invested. Curses are paradoxical.

To make this process more workable, we are going to do away with anger altogether. We will replace anger with a fluid simulation of emotion that is not possible to easily give a name. Once we are able to practice random provocation and appropriate the curse as a double edged sword that it is, cursing will become a more integral part of our everyday language. Behaving in a way that can't easily be explained only liberates us from the burden of making impossible choices.

And as choices are not stable propositions anymore, getting liberated from the burden of making impossible choices is only a panacea. In a puzzle littered with obstructions and entanglements, small graces are nothing short of blessings which we can accept easily.

Easily drifting in and out of moments charged with the emotion of unexplained origin that enables us to feel motivated about cursing earnestly is a very valuable thing. What more can we ask for? An open window, a hollow pipe, a good cry each offer us catharsis. But cursing allows us to get a release and do it in a way that we are undeniably positioned in the game as a political actor. After we utter the first curse, we cannot pretend to be innocent anymore.