I find my life in New York–again, of course–moving at a rapid rate. I don’t mean to play into the trite notion of the rat race, rather I aim to focus explicitly on the unmeditative quality of my life since I’ve arrived here. School plays a large part in my ability to contextualize myself within the space I am currently occupying–in a sense of both physical and metaphysical states. I am at odds without driving. The closer I came to departing from Florida and, “A cursed driving life,” the more I realized how integral driving was to my life; I spent a lot of time in the car. I think what I really enjoyed was the flow of information, objects, bodies, space, numbers, and implicities, and the fact that I was sitting down, raised a few feet from the surface of the road (and the earth), flying through space in a literal chariot at a rapid rate; this was a way for me to inundate myself with enough information–taking placve outside of myeself–to induce a lapse in the thinking that otherwise pervades my life. This other thinking is not something specific–nor specific to ‘my’ life–or detrimental, more a detritus that served to mark the passing of my body through time and space; it is the thinking that blankets life both with itself, and with the decay of the bodies–both physical and metaphysical–that it acts upon.

I have decided to relinquish the tabla, perhaps to myself in another time, or perhaps to a body of which I am no part. At first I thought about how it has no priority in my life, and its perpetuation comes solely out of my–self-microcosmic–resilience to institute discipline, and be dedicated to the fruition of a temporally impalpable accomplishment. It didn’t take long for me to see how school easily replaces the tabla. I came to tabla through drumming, and all the while as I practiced I realized that it stood in sharp contrast to my ideologies of telos in sound, for tabla is the zenith of percussive virtuosity its repertoire and subsequent execution a massive muscle of control over mind and body in lieu of exerting force on an object with the knowledge that the force exerted will be met with a familiar–to the point of one’s skin–result; I am not engaged by this at all. I can’t really say why it took me as long as it has–and a trip to India–to realize this. However, I can say that the process of abandonment is the process of discovering more about one’s complicated inner-mechanics; there is no abandonment that does not rise out of–and in some removed way connote–a deeper knowledge of what constitutes the body, in its accordance of the world that it is within, and the world as it is within.

I hope that I did not offend Danielle Goldman today.

Class is going quite well, and I am getting smarter every day. It may seem like a novel thing to say, but to me that is the the tangible reward of going to graduate school. I will certainly depart from this phase of academia a more concise version of myself, excised form a far broader cloth.

Time is knowing how to utilize it efficiently, and knowing what to do within that efficiency.