Going out or coming in?

Think of the ventricles and arteries of your heart as a rotating door, through which you enter the world and the world enters you.

Negligent optimism

I told someone I've known for a long time but not seen for quite a while about my internal tectonic plate realignment procedure (it involves psychotherapy, allowing the past to pass, becoming comfortably alone, comfortably in company and defining and finding what I want) and she said:

"Remember that it could always be worse."

Whilst it seems like an optimistic phrase, it resonated in me as being a thoroughly apathetic approach.
I would like to gently dispute that everyone should always remember that it could always be better. Everyone should encourage themselves to be healthy and human to the finest of their capacities, and find methods and other people who can help them become a healthy human (don't ask me what that is yet).

Whilst it's true that everything could be worse, thanking the supreme that you haven't fallen down the stairs and broken both your legs or that your mother hasn't committed suicide or that you weren't born in a refugee camp in Mogadishu is a way of ignoring how your own life could be improved which stops you from becoming better and actually capable of helping people with broken legs or no government, no infrastructure, no education and no money.

The hierarchy of duty of care should start with your self and trickle outwards in all directions like a domino effect. How will I know how to care for someone else if I don't know how to care for myself?

Prior to internal tectonic plate realignment procedure

In love and in pain

Writing is like a lover in a dysfunctional relationship, who always turns her head away from you, who always contorts your meaning, who will never quite see you eye-to-eye. You're always trying to kiss her.

Magnetic repulsion between writer and writing

Dissolving

Even if it is just a psychosomatic result of sitting so still for so long that nerve endings fall asleep, the sensation of your body dissolving when meditating is euphoric and beautiful - and why not spend time beautifully?

Afterwards I asked myself what is that experience? And a zen sort of answer arose: inside, I am everything and nothing. It's that dissolving of a feverish mind and the apparent dissolving of a physical body which reveals that beyond both those things, a person can still exist... silent and at large, after having escaped those limits.

How can something be everything and nothing? If I am part of everything there is nothing to separate me. I am no thing if I am inside and inseparable from every thing. The social implications of this paradigm are greater empathy, greater generosity, less fear.

Physics knows we are recycled bits of stars! We're made from other things, our bodies decompose and become other things, so in a comfortingly concrete way we truly are part of everything, our bodies were spangling out in all kinds of directions, whizzing and burring and blooming into galaxies since the time that we call the start of time. And our bodies will go on, invisibly rolling and turning and shifting through  leagues of physical matter over millenia, I imagine a bit like a rat running under a doona cover: rippling along, disguised under the surface.

I know I have written about this many times, important things should be reiterated.

unzip your body                                     unzip your mind                             what's left behind?   

Turning

Once again for me things are slowly moving, things firmly established (memories, attitudes, perceptions) are slowly shifting like tectonic plates - I'm watching land buckle in some areas and oceans expand in other regions. Some parts of my life are under immense pressure and are grinding, crunching and crumbling, rumpling up into little mountain ranges that will need to be surveyed and traversed. Other parts - intellectual, emotional, spiritual - are fanning out into three dimensions and yearning to be plunged and understood. It's this knowing that I don't yet know the dimensions of my self which is humbling and painful too.

When this happens I start to write - hi!
It's not something that will ever stop happening. Life turns. This is the wheel creaking back into motion again.

I guess learning to turn with grace is the most important lesson at this interval. Learning to accept and move forward, learning the right pace, the right direction, the most adroit footwork: and tangoing with your own troubles, looking deep into troubles eyes, holding troubles clammy hands and getting to know trouble intimately. Trouble is like a friend who doesn't want to dance at a party, they'd rather you stand with them on the side, shoulders hunched and arms crossed, whilst everybody else thrashes and jerks and yodels with an untamed vigour and frothy-mouthed thirst for life. Trouble will hold you back. My troubles have held me back and sat me down and been smarmy and cynical about people with popping veins and sweaty foreheads.
I want popping veins and a sweaty forehead.

I don't want to seem too buoyant, but right this moment I feel hopeful. I feel that by turning and changing just as seasons turn, just as the Earth turns, just as a whirling dervish turns, I will find what I need and see 360 degrees of my situation as I go.

Incorrect example of productive turning.

Put the inside on the outside - is it good?

I think that song is from the Simpsons or some other delicious low grade popular social commentary text, and I believe it was a jingle in the cartoon for a chocolate bar... "oozy gooey chewy on the inside... crunchy munchy chocolate on the outside... you put the inside on the outside, is it good?" or something of a similar ilk.

Being part of the world means putting your inside on the outside.
Art has also for a long time been about putting the inside on the outside and then wondering whether it's good. To avoid having to wonder  whether what they're doing is good nowadays plenty of people just put the outside on the outside; they find something about the world and show it in a new light by making it ambiguous or concrete. Instead of being inventors they've turned to salespeople. Instead of having to wonder whether their insides are good or bad they can look at ideas and attitudes and occurrences in the world and say "this is bad, I'll show you how bad it is". Often in contemporary art people don't say "this is good, I'll show you how good it is", because faith isn't as eye catching as heresy. So I'm starting to see contemporary art as a locus where artists are less like people and more like agencies of consciousness - conduits of a collective vision. Instead of art being about art or artists, art is about us.

I feel that people not engaged with that contemporary commercial cult of art may often see artists as people with long feelings that unravel like some abstract line drawled across canvasses large enough to engulf a persons entire line of sight - lines potent with emotion, drawn out of them directly from the heart, down the left arm and through a paintbrush. Certainly those people do exist, and anyone can be that person. But the problem with putting the inside on the outside like that is that the need then arises to wonder whether it's good.

I guess I'm returning to a question I've already asked with an answer I've already found... Good and bad should be eliminated from vocabulary. Good and bad are too ethereal and have no human voice behind them. Wise and unwise are more relatable. I can imagine what a wise person does far more easily than imagine what a good person does.

I'm going to see art as wise and unwise.

Put the inside on the outside - is it good?

Places that need to be beautiful

Schools need to be beautiful.

People care more when they break a ming vase than when they break a mass produced cheap bowl that was cast from a mold.
Our schools need to be unique, expensive and well designed because otherwise they get vandalised and dilapidated, and because of the psychological complications that stem from being around ugliness. Places that have consciousness invested in them - often places of worship - are revered and maintained. Schools are our temples in which we pray for the future by doing charity work (let's face it - might as well be unpaid) so why don't we make them look holy?

With children, what you put in is what you get out - when you feed kids red icy-poles they turn feral.  If what you put in is what you get out, a human who ingests beautiful things through the eyes knows how to be beautiful (ordered, precise, considered, delicate, charming) more than someone who sees under fluorescent lighting and is caged inside of boxes made from board-formed concrete where shouting and door slams echo at an unbearably loud volume.