blur,

unaddressed, usually not fully conscious leaking — spouting — of “threads and shreds” of one’s mental activity, from barely audible poetry mutterings to spontaneous multimodal performances (faraway music, readable clothing, projective graphics). Blur — a fuming “halo of mind,” a steam of cooking, a demonstrable lucid dream — is often stimulated and augmented by feeleries, at times with no intelligent entity involved (arfgrass); cultures, civilizations blur just as profusely (radio halo, beam backup, Message) as individual minds. ■    Blur is “what you’d still be saying with no one listening”; from an attribute of reclusive creativity (“forest of feedback loops,” tossing to catch, thinking by listening to yourself) it evolved into a socialization aid — a cure for stumbling conversations, a way to open up without being intrusive, a springboard for the gap between saying nothing and something: “a softener of mindcrust.” Ever since language, parents blur at children (“motherese”) to seed their minds, and children blur back — unconsciously, adirectionally — as they play; taking a clue from the instinct, blur has been crucial in the culture of learning: “say, write, sing what you’ve just understood” — “blur it out on the Road.” In Minds, blurring is very direct, not fully controllable; “like paying a visit to someone’s lifetime nest where everything is the owner,” simply floating through Arf close to a long-resident Mind bathes you in her transient feeleries, communication bits, idiosyncratic storage.

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