Crafty explosions!

Over these past three days I have become a recycling machine turning things I already own into new things I didn't know I had the potential to create. I've shaped the mold for a lost wax ring, carved a woodcut block and made prints, begun two collages that I mailed to the woman I love to complete, arranged tassels, sequins, fabric and card into four pairs of nipple pasties, sewn and hemmed a fox fur collar and today I will commence that most 70s of crafts: bead tapestry finished with macrame edges. Many of these pursuits don't coalesce with my wider aim to create artwork that is aesthetically and conceptually rich, but they have an equally important function of NOT DESTROYING MY SOUL.
Plus who isn't enticed by lime sequinned nipple pasties with pompom trim?

I need to have fun, because recently my capacity to laugh has been limited to a bitter chuckle when watching others in pain or publicly embarrassed, and that's the lowest form of humour there is. University put a tap in my brain and then turned it on full blast until the reservoir completely ran dry and a possum went and set up house in the tank - the bottom of which was subsequently coated in a pungent layer of possum faecal matter. Perhaps I shouldn't liken my brain to an empty black hole with possum shit at the bottom, but that's honestly how it felt by the end of this university semester. So now I'm doing what any sensible person would do: filling it with funny pretty things as quickly as possible so it stops feeling empty and black and smelly.

At a point when all my brain juice was gushing from my head and I felt woozy and weak, one of my most lovely friends commented that the problem from his point of view was that he sees me as an artist who is being asked to spend all of her time in academia where the demands of reading and writing don't leave much space for any sort of connection with the material world and a creative engagement with it. Indeed I had begun to feel like I had no body and that I was just a brain floating in space, used to calculate the appropriate locations for full stops in citations for essays... the last indicator that I had a soul buried somewhere deep inside me was evident in my eyes which, despite the hunched and weakened image of my form, would stare with a penetrating longing at any artworks shown to us in lectures, taking in the elements and principles of design as a sort of war ration. When times are tough we revert to the elements and principles.

I love reading and writing. I'm here now writing so that in the future I can read this. But I can't live inside words alone and neither can I live inside images alone. In fact I love instances when they commingle and interblend... for example in many religious scriptures. I think this gives me the feeling that I'm being fed wholesome food for my left and right brain.

There is a slight concern regarding the veracity with which I apply myself to the making of things. I tend to leave a trail of canvas and glitter glue and block ink and varnish as I puff like a little tornado through the flat, propping up an animation disc against a chair in the dining room and setting up an easel in the kitchen. Eventually it peters out and I end up lying, smiling in a small nest of sandpaper and wood shavings. At the time I feel incapable of stopping. I'm not being romantic about that, there's a tinge of hyperactive obsession about it and it becomes quietly aggravating if I can't devote complete concentration to the task at hand.

I suppose from here I need to learn how to rest and how to clean up.

Dealing with my own problems in a sort of round about upside down incoherent way

Sometimes I feel that this space has been created for me to write about the things I discover that aren't connected to my individual existence, but are universal (I think) in an attempt to avoid the trap of mulling over problems and whinging.

But I made this space, and I'm the sole contributor, I never set any rules, so I will write about myself.
And my individual experience isn't meant to be entrapped in my head or my body, because if that were the case I would be a rock. I was made with a mouth and a mind and so were you, and I guess that makes us similar enough for my story to resonate with whatever yours is. Once the words are out there minds connect and dialogue flows and from that point, unity is approachable. At the moment our society is a bunch of gravel on a driveway... we're just little rocks that get run over all the time and we can't even talk about how much it hurts. When difficult things happen in our lives I think it is crucial to be capable of talking about them without feeling guilty or afraid or alone. Shame fear and loneliness will eat your soul.

Essentially my current situation is understanding what "otherness" is. If I were an anarchist I would say that it doesn't exist, but there are trends in human behaviour and any trend results in a norm, and any norm excludes others that don't conform to it, so "otherness" does exist. Simultaneously there are communities of "others" in which their "otherisms" are common custom, so depending on what level you want to observe society you could say that otherness is irrelevant because others create a space to house their own breed of normalcy, or you could say on a grander scale that we are divided into the normals and the abnormals.

Being "other" means this: having a distinct self-awareness of your inability to be average. Everybody in some way is different, and their differences can be like giant red arrows hovering over their heads in particular situations, like being half the height of most people for example. Or their differences might not be visible. Maybe there are perks to being half the height of everyone else, I'm not sure. Some people enjoy their inability to be average, sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's irrelevant, sometimes it's consuming. Sometimes it's forced from you and sometimes it rustles through other peoples comfort zones.

I think I am okay with the ways in which I am incapable of being average. It's those invisible comfort zones that act as floaties around the waists of people adrift in a sea where who knows what weirdos swim that one doesn't want to accidentally deflate because that can cause thrashing and panicking... But it's their responsibility to learn how to swim and you can't carry around a packet of band-aids to plug up all the punctures because they get wet in the water.

What I grapple with is how love can cause other people pain, although I feel that the people who will be pained might be seeing things from a superficial vantage and not comprehend the simplicity and honesty of a situation that isn't about them anyway... 

Why I like stories

I have figured it out!
I now know what I only half knew, and only knew through experience rather than cognition!

I love metaphor because it allows me to express what I can't touch, taste, smell or see in a concrete way. More carefully I am paying attention to the physicality of experience and thus it follows that those things which are too obtuse to manifest in particles find their way into recognition through words that link them to imaginative scenarios which are palpable, which squeak or sparkle.

On the just use of starvation

Sacrifice is synonymous with loss and surrender. Forgoing the things that are precious to a higher power.

Maybe there will come a time when you are surprised to realise that your eyes are closed. It might interest you to know that you've seen the world only through your hands - fingers for eyes - for who knows how long, and it will frighten you to see wholly that which you've only known in touch. You were content with your former mode of experience, limited as it was. 

Opening your eyes is akin to sacrificing limitations. Our limitations are precious to us, we hold them so closely that we can't see them and often we become them. And we all know how hard it is to see the self.

Build a scapegoat of all your limitations and send it off into the desert where it won't feed off your consciousness, let it starve to death. You will become more your self.

Some Great Gardens of the Soul

Here I am in a garden. It's paradisical like Eden but sober like Gethsemane.
It has something of the enchanting diaspora of Dandaka. Maybe Humbaba is waiting, hiding between cedars until we dance past, but probably not.