Aquarium health

I love listening to people talk about what they do. If I could, I would spend all my time listening and asking questions.

My mental illness is one that is a bit green and gluggy. My heart clogs up with algae. Listening to other people is like putting a hose down a coronary artery and blasting the slime out. Listening leaves no space for introspection. 

My algal blooms aren't the kind of bouquet you want to give someone you love, they would be a weed. A man at an art show once said that weeds are just plants in the wrong places, that all weeds are native to some place. My mental illness is native to me, it evolved over the duration of my life as the plant which was best able to thrive under the environmental context of my childhood. Happiness was definitely going to wilt, the conditions weren't appropriate for happiness. 

That's why I have felt comfortable living for so long with a giant kelp infestation inside me. This is also the reason why other people find it so foreign, like an extraterrestrial life form. Of course it would be nice not to have this seaweed problem, to not come home to a thin velvety veneer of slime coating my vision or giant black scratchy kelp forests clogging my emotional life, but the truth remains that in actuality it isn't a problem, there is no blame and there is no cure. It's just the predomination of one species. I just need a more diverse ecosystem in my chest.

I find on the whole that there are hugely gratifying and worthwhile engagements with people that make me fall in love with listening and talking and lustily urge me to chase after communion. As my appetite for stories and people grows, my kelp infestation doesn't lessen, but I learn slowly how to introduce new species, ones which filter the environment and provide nutrients, maybe some little fish, a sea snail to clean the walls, a bêche de mere just for laughs.

Spell it out

I heard artist Jonathan Jones talk this afternoon, he seemed uncomfortable and embarrassed speaking to a group of people, but nonetheless he told stories which seemed to be already written in our brains. His stories were familiar, communal. He spells better with his artworks however.

I saw the film Ship of Theseus on Tuesday night as part of Sydney Film Festival. The writer/director gave a brief introduction to the film, and he spoke quietly, he said nearly nothing at all, except for phrases one learns by watching others who are more socially adept "thanks for making it out tonight guys". After which ensued a rich, long, living stream of beautifully articulated cinematography. Some people are very shy when it comes to vocalising their message. Some people just can't say what they mean, so instead meaning flops out of them in funny amorphous blobs which we call art.

Mmm blobby.

Fishslappin'

Being the soft creatures that we are, it can be difficult to withstand big hurts, physical and psychological.

When life gives you a fishslap in the face it can be quite the cold wet swot! I've noticed that for some people, seafood propelled injuries can have such a deep and lasting impact that they become highly sensitive to the smell of fish and nearly expect to have bream wallop their snouts.

I've noticed that even some time after having undergone a traumatic or unpleasant experience, when confronted by a wholly new problem in an entirely different context it is common to paste ones knowledge of the past onto to the current predicament. You see the head of a pig, yet expect the tail of a fish. Then you start to treat a pig like a fish and accidentally drown it.

I think we may all be guilty of such illogical behaviour at times.

Guess you've got to listen for the squeals and grunts.

Curious flavour.

Stories

History and myth articulate the human condition. We're all compelled by ethics, by adventure, by journeys... We're all cushioned in the grand narratives that seat us somewhere within humanity, goodness and evil constantly punch each others noses in pantomimes which play themselves out in literature and art. Stories about ourselves get formed out of ideas and comments from others, and the texture, size, mass and colour of your physical body also becomes a framework for a certain story about you. I begin to hear a story or write a story and somehow I end up believing it.

Stories are dangerous because they condense experience into some sort of language, they codify knowledge. They may be beautiful mirrors of life, but they are not life. Storytellers are sculptors who carve out a theory from the solid block of being. The stuff which was the negative space surrounding that theory gets thrown to the wayside, despite it being of the same substance as what is kept. In the end I wonder why the story itself isn't considered the off cut. 

Maybe it's the distance between stories and reality that allow us to feel comfortable. Without stories, maybe we could see reality without any filters. We're all authors, and I recall writing stories in my mind about things I don't really know just to make them familiar. Most often stories about people. If you parcel them up then you'll know how to unwrap them.

But when I stop telling myself stories, the world expands. 

I love ingesting and on occasion chiselling out stories, but what I love even more is letting the story die, like any other living thing in the creation, and watching that narrative as an arrow, which can be located within space and time, shooting in one direction towards reality. It has it's particular trajectory, but its path and the many diverging paths of stories all aim towards something so large that it is all pervasive.

Believing stories about yourself.

ALARM developed by Max Woods (English Second Language teacher at Freshwater Campus)

I have a brain that likes to pull things apart.
It's been a problem that my brain has this habit but sometimes goes about it with no method. It just likes ripping. My hands do the same thing with serviettes.

My brain does snufflings and tearings and gets its teeth in to pull the stuffing out of something and throw it in the air in tiny little cascading flufflets and at the end there is just messy fluffy stuff everywhere and it's just confusing and doesn't make sense so I just go away.

But I've been introduced to a method.
It's a method which isn't messy. It's a method used in schools to teach students how to learn.
The results thus far have produced more "a-ha!"s than "huh?"s.

It's called ALARM, which at first makes one think it could just as easily be called ANXIETY or PANIC... until you realise it stands for 'A Learning And Responding Matrix'.
It helps you know how to go about discovering knowledge and then how to 'respond'... or act on it. It gets used to write answers to essay questions e.g. "Analyse the nature of Israel's involvement in the conflict at the Gaza strip."

But to combat the spindly teeth in my brain that have a penchant for aimlessly chewing at problems in my life, I am using the matrix to answer questions like "What are the characteristics of Emma Barry and should they be cultivated or discarded?"

Once you have your question, you take apart each subject of the question (e.g. "good at listening", "afraid to speak her mind") and for each subject you:

1. Name and Define - "what is it?"
2. Describe - "what is it like?"
3. Explain - "to what purpose is it like that?"
4. Analyse - "how does it work?"
5. Interpret - "what effect does it have?"
6. Critically Analyse - "what are the positives and negatives?"
7. Evaluate - "use the above evidence to answer the question."


By evaluate, you have an answer that you can be sure has been held up to the light, sat upside-down, thrown down a well, gone through a goose and come out shining with the polish of ones own reason. It's not easy, especially with subjects like "is creative" and step 3. "to what purpose is it like that?"
But the question is important and deserves full investigation.

So I'm sitting down with my brain in a muzzle and it's feeling pretty civilised, knowledgeable and rational.

Prior habit and new method.

Etymology

We use words without remembering their power or their inferences. Language is a blanket and a single word is the point of contact between one warp and one weft thread: pick it up and the whole structure of language shifts with it. Words have lives, words are born of other words and grow fatter with the signification of their predecessors.

Why is it that there are a few people which conjure in me a sense that they are not 'human'? Their behaviour doesn't feel human. Human is from humus which means earth... meaning that we are earthly beings, opposed to Gods. The particular individuals I am thinking of act with the sort of influence and power that some people describe as Godly. They use the world around them like an offering, they want hymns of praise.

God has a few possible origins. Greek khein 'to pour', Old English ghut 'that which is invoked', Sanskrit huta 'invoked' (from the root gheu 'to invoke') and Proto-Indo-European gheu 'to pour, pour a libation'.
Invoked is related to vocare 'to call' or vox 'voice'.
So a God is something who you want to call, someone you would pour a drink for. Someone to beseech, to talk with, someone we entreat. I'm guessing then that God is pretty talkative, and the kind of dude who might know quite a bit about stuff - otherwise we wouldn't go offering him drinks and ringing him up so frequently.

These people who act like Gods do not have advice, they aren't the sort of people I would call on if I had a problem. They act with a sort of hollow power. False prophets. Power is the energy created by having knowledge. Being attractive is the effect of giving knowledge. These people don't have knowledge... they can't give knowledge.
So really they are powerless and ugly. They don't want people to know so they construct big peacock tails, don crowns and eat double cream without reserve... one thing they do know is the persuasive command of appearances.

Family

This is a promise to the future human beings I take under my care:

I will plan for you, you won't have been accidental.
I will always be honest with you.
I will always respect you.
I will make you a home and put these things inside it: books, artworks, plant life, animals, food from a garden, music from my mouth and also a stereo, bicycles, skipping ropes and balls, and the most important ingredient - people with big minds and knowledge of the world they can teach you, big hands that can hold you and discipline you, big hearts like colossal trees that house ecosystems of emotion with love at the top of the food chain, big ideas that exemplify passion and determination, big eyes that see you as an individual with your own ideas and desires.

I want to raise children in a community so that they don't feel trapped by two parents, so that the lessons they learn are diverse, so that there are more people around to torture them with tickling. I already know individuals whom I would be honoured to bless my progeny in the presence of.
I think childrearing will be the fullest dilation of my heart, a devotion that can't be reversed.
I want to help children learn about themselves and learn about myself in so doing.

From now on I am planning a life that I am going to share with a big family... children, a partner if I find one who wants to join me, friends and parents and anyone, any animal, who I meet who shares their heart with the same ease and consistency with which we give out carbon dioxide.

I want to bring people together in a big family who can talk and crawl and learn and fly and cry and think and  be human together.