from you to the blur
a memoir of process and intention
Intakes
I have been offering a intentional mindfilling of the blur as a means to clarify categories that have become too hardened, too defined or over-determined, and so unconsciously dogmatic. Or worse. Not in relation to truthfulness or logical or tech-tree-like procedural syllogisms, but in relation to the potholes such processes can get stuck in, i.e. suboptimal solutions. They work, but stuck in the pothole we cannot see the mountaintop.
It is easy to say the word reframing but hard to do it.
taking notes
Over at, Shane Devine’s “No One Knows (I)” on his substack newsletter Primitive Accumulations, of the 10 October 2025, I left a comment about the realisation of the connection between the blur and stream of consciousness writing, which I will here re-write, and add to from my notebook. A term commonly attributed to William James.
“The blur” begins, looking back, as type of stream of consciousness writing of an SF story, as it occurred to a character for whom pronouns are not as we know them, and not due to any personal idiosyncrasy but as a representative of a future or alien culture which had no use for pronouns, a type of prepositional labelling which located speech in relation to speakers and hearers and those no doing either. A imaginary culture and language that used other categories, by a character who lived as an emigre, in an equally different but supportive culture, a character whose survived with guilt, with some form of PTSD, and events which cannot be broached.
I explained none of this to readers at the time, being quite young. I hoped the words themselves would generate feelings. (Perhaps these feelings would be familiar to those on the spectrum, but to gregarious types no-so-much.)
I also have to mention here ‘automatic writing‘ which was known to me but its inchoate theory was not what I was interested in. Good warm-up practice for those who are not ‘good’ at writing at the drop of a hat, as is speaking in tongues for the mute.
See the chapters in .before Country (PDF) headed ‘child rajer’, ‘ad rajer, spikechild’ & ‘ad rajer’. The first of these were written in the mid to late 1980s. The POD title was put together in the mid-2000s, as part of an effort to infect the long tail.
taking time to look back
The connection with ‘the blur’ is that it was written in a fugue-like state, more so than me writing while just happily filtering out what is going on around me. This is why I have a section on writing and altered states in my blog.
And even rajer, that character of the far spiked future was produced in a similar process to those people I wrote out, in my first work ‘inside outback’, of which copies exist on floppy disks somewhere. It contained, of course, memories of my childhood written in the second person. The reader is the writer, if very forgetful. Those stories/memories took place in Springwood, New South Wales.
Of ‘inside outback’ a publisher’s reader wrote “so highly internalised as to be inaccessible”.
While in .before Country the stream puts the peeps minus pronouns in a transport into a badly-spiked far future, to an alt.colonial version of Tasmania.
See Algorithms for flowers (PDF). It’s a farewell tour to .before Country.
taking a connection
① At that time in the early 1980s the/my influences were Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (Becket came later) and some sense of their stream of consciousness writing, but especially To the lighthouse. Joyce’s scale was too large.
② As I said these were experimented first in the second person, a common experimental trap for young players, however I did not retreat after I learnt my lessons.
③ I attempted a zero person writing. I.E. language which was not centred around a grammar of positioning language with regard to who is speaking, who is listening, or who is neither but perhaps talked about. Or at least, attempt to efface that (as writing in the second person already does).
④ decades later this informed my blur of categories.
It was all an attempt to recover the world, or at least the ‘specious’ world [ c.f. M. F. Cleugh use of William James’ “the specious present’ to map the types of time] of firstly, memories in the second person stuck in what is now the past, and secondly, in the intentional blur, in part, to include: the world of experience undivided by selfing, even though some where in there is a point of view.
Out takes
Current pronoun debates are thus revolting.One can do things without knowing.
One can make without knowing how.
One cannot world without knowing someone.
When we intersubjectively remove the individual POV to create better objective measures and categories, we can also forget, curiously, the social learning that makes intersubjective efforts possible.So are some unrecognised efforts values without names? And therefore unvalued and thus escape good worlding? (What is unconscious is not always subconscious.)
Untaken road
There is also the influence of the ideas but not the practice of: meditation & prayer, drugs & altered states, and other intentional attendances to consciousness. I’ll connect the influences up some other time.
M. F. Cleugh. Time And Its Importance In Modern Thought. Methuen, 1937. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.172131.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse.
Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com