ajar.

Thank you for your message; which we enjoyed greatly. It is nice and it is useful to learn a little about your background and current life; to have your remarks put into context to some extent. Engaging with new people is a curious activity, we feel; curious as in somewhat fascinating. Large chunks of a person's life - hugely-significant, lived second by second, and forming the core of that person - often doled-out in a few words, almost in the manner of footnotes. Life itself forces such compressions, doesn't it? Relatedly, we are always amazed by how words themselves seem to change their meaning on the page or screen. We try to be careful in our utterances; because we want to be clear and also efficient; but also because we want to avoid confusion, and thus argument which is not necessary. But a speaker can have all the intention in the world. Words have something of a life of their own - and one sneaky thing they do is convert particularity and pointedness into generality, during their journey from mouths to receiving-ears, typing-fingers to receiving eyes. In that spirit, our reference to parts of your prose being 'obscure' to us was meant only in regard to your actual myspace messages to us - obscurities which we put down to regional differences, colloquialisms, nothing more. So we thought your 'light' remark was asking us something we did not understand and thus needed to learn about. Nothing was meant about your poems. Poetry is fine with obscurism, for us - to make a general, ideological point. We ourselves see surrealism as an interesting option as artists. So we have no problem with seeming shifts away from utility and supposed rationalism. We like play; we feel play itself is a useful and life-affirming activity. Words are beautiful things to us. To spend time in their company - as it were - is something we like to do. Similarly, we never intended to sign up to any form of absolutism. Our raising the word was shorthand for a kind of imperative: we seek reciprocity absolutely, ie. we seek it as a basic need. Sorry for our sloppiness on these issues, and thanks for your patience. Please let us just say that we seek only positive encounters - as far as possible; and we are never seeking to caricature or disrespect other persons and their work. So, hello ... pleased to cyber-meet you; you seem an interesting person; we would like to spend some of our time exploring the idea that we might enjoy your company. We feel those compressions of life should be slowed-down and the emotions and events must be unpacked - if one is to have meaningful exchanges. One does this with 'actual'-friends, of course. But here in this new and weird world of 1000s of cyber-friends, one has to confect other strategies to extract acceptable levels of meaning. One simply cannot have the same depth with such numbers. That's usually fine, though, as most just want to post notices on one's page! But - as we attempted to say previously - we think this cyber environment is valid and we seek to live well within it, keeping our values intact, and making modest contributions which might matter in a few places. It is, though, a clamour of voices, as we said. There is a kind of psychosis here. But it is the same psychosis which you highlighted as inherent in consciousness itself: life, Being et al is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless. As you said, '...futility is not futile...'. We all live that oxymoron. What choice, in one sense, does one have but to 'carry on' with life and make the best of that oxymoron - or 'going' on, as the English poet, Peter Reading, has dubbed it? Having an artistic-bent adds to this, we would say. We feel we are somewhat hypersensitive to certain things in being 'artistic' - if we can say without appearing to claim special powers. We claim nothing of the kind. We simply have this condition and wish to use it in positive ways. We are pleased to hear that your words have touched people. We have been similarly lucky to have had others kindly tell us what we make matters to them. Your intentions are good it seems. Such moments are wonderful. Regarding impetus for making things, our philosophy is this: we just make what we make, as a kind of fun thing, avoiding all that self-regarding art blather and self-promotion. Crucially, we do not see art as any kind of business venture. We are pretty crap at Capitalism; no good at selling ourselves. We have played the mainstream game - years ago. But we did not like it or most of the people we encountered there. It conflicted with our politics and caused us upset because of that. Such purists! Now, we make things and freely offer them up for response or not just as part of what we do - all recreationally, without fanfare, but with serious intent, as a form of dedicated research. Several of us have been through PhDs; all are artists, musicians, writers. But we are kind of punk-hippie, too. We have read and read and read - as one must. Now, though - but as we always knew - only love matters. Only love and kindness brings meaning. We say this, too, without recourse to any kind of nameable system of thought or spirituality. We are not peddling any such system. Our religion is perhaps a kind of commitment to a kind of fun. We are evangelical about this - but never dogmatic, we hope. We can do the dialectics-u-like thing, but prefer to raise a chuckle rather than drive some point home and destroy another's argument with our supposed erudition. That's just cowboys to us; and one eventually just meets another fastest gun in the West. One must, however, stand up to be counted - and we do and we have. We do argue when we feel it is needed. But such interventions must be morally-based and not just a disguise for self-interest, we feel. As you say, ontology ... yes. It is about Being. If one were to cut the issues up into slices of philosophy pie, it's also about existentialism, too; insofar as one gets choices - to act in good faith or bad. These choices live within the kind of framework described by Habermass. There is phenomena, also: there is us and the world of inanimate things. There is verisimilitude. There is physical decay, aging. All these departments - all these issues... Then, as you say, there is the self, in the midst of these things, regarding them, reconfiguring them, regarding its own self, reconfiguring its own self, endlessly, and then being stopped at some indeterminate point, and cast back into nothingness. To us, only a kind of black comedy or gallows humour works to attempt to sort all this out for us. We offer it as no kind of panacea, however. It's just our thing. If others get joy - that is wonderful; and we hope for that, certainly. We get wider meaning for our lives by trying to be good lovers, friends, and helpers. The art is just part of that. Thanks again. Best wishes & take care.