Year Frontiers

 

When you work in systems things can go on indefinitely. The way I work, especially in music, is to create a series. An album is a series just as artwork can be serialized. [My Intervals series is an example. I started it so I could continue it indefinitely if I decided (resolved) to]. It's a CONTINUA-TION. 

The problem with New Year's resolutions is that they typically don't really rely on open-ended systems. They start over again at the beginning of a calendar year and aren't a continuation of anything. You don't have to be concerned with the year changing if you work in systems. There's no threshold or border to cross--nothing is visibly changing when you step from Illinois into Wisconsin or from Indiana to Michigan. The terrain is the same.

2000 years ago there were no country boundaries as we now know them, but empires had soft borders that were also open-ended. They were frontiers. They were metageographical--or even psychogeographical--a state of mind or a feeling that they're different in some mysterious way.

A year can create a threshold (as in the 1966 threshold), but that is only seen in retrospect. 2024 will be one of those years perhaps, but we still need to see 2016 as a sea change year, but perhaps will be in 30 years.

Human Universals for milestones:

classification of inner states
classification of space
measuring
myths
narrative
past/present/future
planning for future
time, cyclic
units of time
world view