How to Fall Down a Rabbit Hole
by Alden Burke
“What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there a limit to the desire for more?…Are words the conduit through which your desires travel, or are they just an afterthought, an add-on, a trick of your human mind to justify the prelinguistic itch that prefigures it?”
–Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)
How to fall down a rabbit hole is a selection of methods, tools, considerations and resources to help you uncover question-paths. Akin to desire-paths—trodden walkways representing where one wants to go, rather than where they’re expected to—questions-paths are here defined as conceptual, visual, or physical routes that encourage and necessitate one’s capacity for curiosity. With question-paths, much, like falling down a rabbit hole, curiosity helps us better attune ourselves to our desires, needs, proclivities, and how these play out in the world around us.
This syllabus outlines and offers a toolkit for the proverbial fall, including prompts for wandering, observing, following, considering, meeting the edge, falling, and finding. This system of exploration and reflection is helpful in, but not limited to, the following situations:
- Identifying root causes to complex or ambiguous questions
- Bringing clarity to a set of questions that feels overwhelming
- Understand the scope of a data-set (and/or expanding/receding the scope)
- Breaking patterns by strengthening pattern recognition skills
- Practicing curiosity and surprise as default modes of moving through the world
The following prompts vacillate between states of being and actionable process-steps. Using these tools and resources, you will leave feeling confident following curiosity through its spiraling, burrowing path-potentials. The hope is to come out on the other side with a greater sense of self, transforming initial question-paths into ones driven by attuned desires.
To prepare for these exercises, it’s encouraged to dedicate space (ideally physically, but digitally works as well) with large sheets of paper that you can leave out for days at a time. Parts of a dinner or work table, or even a dedicated wall space is great for this. If you want to do this work digitally, MURAL, Miro, and Whimsical all have great free options.
UNSTICKING
To move into this space, some might have a question or thought they want to flesh out, open up, push against—this is a great place to start. Some might begin with an openness to discovering what emerges while moving through the steps—this is an equally great place to start.
The following steps can be used in and out of order, and should be iterated upon based on your individual ways of working.
WANDERING
Whether you’re starting with a specific question or an openness to discovery, movement is a fundamental tool for this work. It allows us to take what might seem set or static and add dimension. This practice of movement can turn a circle into a cylinder, a cylinder into a portal, a portal into a rabbit-hole. The act of walking is a simple way to develop this practice.
Invitations
Dedicate Time for Walking
→ Walk for 45 minutes each day, never repeat the same path
→ Walk for 45 minutes each day, taking the same path each time
→ Walk with nowhere to go; walk until the light changes
Trace Yourself in Space
→ Using materials of your choice, create simple drawings tracing the walking paths from your week
Consider the following:
Where do you find yourself? What directions are obvious? Available? Hidden? What movements reveal new ways of navigating your space?
Resources
→ “Mishearing, topologies of displacement, and generative substitutions are instantly recognizable to experienced (musical) improvisers as part of an arsenal of devices that keep improvised materials “moving on”—keeping cocreative sites of production “alive” with the flow of the unexpected, the unintended, the real-time decision-making and risk-taking in which yes, even misapprehension can be generative. Which is also to perhaps state the obvious: movement, “moving on,” the real-time shape-shifting of contingencies, is a key aspect of the “living on” that becomes an event horizon of the possible when such movement, the movement of becoming, occurs”
–Daniel Fischlin, “Moving On/Living On…Towards a Theory of Improvisation and Interdisciplinarity” (2018)
→ Yoko Ono, Map Piece (1962–64)—reposted examples
OBSERVING
Mary Oliver says that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” What we observe helps determine and dictated what we might fall in love with. Observing brings the necessary practice of identifying and articulating what is in and around you, and documentation brings what we notice into the fold of understanding.
Invitations
Fall in love every day
→ Permiss yourself to fall in love—with a person, a moment, a feeling, an object, a color, a sound–everyday.
→ From your walks (or other activities) begin to document the things you are noticing and falling in love with.
Create a mind map
→ Using a large piece of paper (ideally, taking up a big wall or laid out on a table), begin to plot what emerges as you practice wandering and noticing. This can include fragments of or fully fleshed out ideas
◆ Fold in your walks: what did you observe? Feel?
◆ Trace your walks from memory
→ Add to the map throughout the course of following and falling
Consider the following
How might your wanderings and observations form a landscape of question-paths? What questions and/or bridges emerge from this plotting? Where are you beckoned to move next?
Resources
→ Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver (2016)
→ Adelheid Mers’ Diagramatic Instruments
→ The Power of Mind Mapping – Forbes Article
→ “You asked what I might fall in love with after our conversation was over. I took off my headphones and walked out of the room and saw these green chairs, which I immediately fell in love with, photographed, and will certainly paint sometime soon. The eternal pleasure of chance encounters.”
–Maria Kalman on the On Being Podcast (2017)
FOLLOWING
Following brings movement and observation into the realm of relationality—an invisible tethering of one thing to another. This tethering gives time and space for curiosities to marinate, drawing you closer to what you might eventually fall into and find.
Invitations
Five minute paragraphs
→ Select a topic or theme that emerged from mind mapping. Set a timer and spend five minutes free writing about the topic. Repeat this for the same topic 4x over, always starting with the initial sentence you formulated.
→ Write until your topic feels whole
Find the patterns
→ Using notation style of your choice, begin connecting ideas and musings on the map, organizing your map into clusters of topics or themes
◆ Optional: create another mind map to move ideas around—movement of ideas is just as important as movement of the body
→ Give the patterns a shape—this shape is your rabbit role
Consider the following
What is repeated? What bears being repeated? What grabs your attention and what are you allergic to?
Resources
→ “Dominant groups often maintain their power by keeping information from subordinate groups. That dominance is altered when knowledge is shared in a way that reinforces mutual partnership… If we are not able to find and enter the open spaces in a closed system (no matter the catalyst for the openness), we doom ourselves by reinforcing the belief that these educational systems cannot be changed.”
–bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)
→ Interview with Fred Moten on collective improvisation and collaboration (2015)
FALLING
A threshold is the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested (Merriam-Webster). The shape of your knowledge is a threshold. In meeting its edge, what do you need to jump?
Invitations
Ground and Sky
→ Lay on the ground with your eyes closed; imagine the ground disappears from underneath you, but the falling doesn’t feel startling or scary, and instead is a welcome sensation in your body
→ Find a soft plot of land; stand as tall as you can and then gently let your body slack; repeat
→ Using a piece of cardboard, cut out the shape of your knowledge threshold; this is now your portal—what comes through?
Permission
→ Permit yourself to fall and document what comes loose. Draw it, write it, turn it over in your mind, tether yourself to it, say it out loud, say it out loud again, write about, draw it again, etc etc etc etc
Consider the following
What other portals do you have access to, and how do they differ or how are they similar to your rabbit hole?
Resources
→ “Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. The moment I put one word onto an empty page, I have created a problem for myself. The poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem…In the end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but that is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.”
–Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)
FINDING
“Taking a fresh look at the simplest forms leads to considering fundamental concepts; and reassessing basic concepts of forms opens up the road to reconsider other views.”
–Éva Forgács’ “The Bauhaus Paradox: Creativity, Freedom and the Long-Lasting Legacy of Bauhaus in Hungary” (2020)
The beauty of the rabbit hole, and the warren you create by falling down it, is how it activates your curiosity to generate new, reflective pockets of information and knowledge. And the better you become at “finding,” the more portals emerge, and the farther you get from a complete sense of having found. The state of curiosity is one of abundance: an unlimited resource for connecting, exploring, reflecting, documenting, and creating. To find is to begin, again, to wander.
Weeeeeeeeeeeee, down the hole. Wwwweeeeeeeeeeeee