Be bewildered

Talking about your own confusion is something difficult, because it makes you vulnerable to the intelligence of others who may be scathing or just be disinterested in you, because you can't communicate at their level.

But if you can unstick your attachment to the idea that other people have to like you then talking about confusion is a gift. It takes a coherent person to communicate inchoate or irrational phenomena. Allowing yourself to be incoherent signifies that you value the intelligence of those in your company, you value their capacity to piece together disparate ideas. You want them to join you on the journey through your head.

I'm not advocating insanity because I don't know a productive insanity. I'm a fan of productivity and I'm interested in finding ways to live in this society without destroying ourselves, and I think one way is to let our brains play, often, everyday. Things are more interesting and fun, and the thing that will kill you is stress and monotony. There are plenty of books, and here I am writing about it again - but it comes down to your decisions to do strange things. Don't put a toothpick in your eye, do lie on the footpath at 2am and watch the moon for a while, if you want to.

Confusion is the stuff that questions are made of, questions are the stuff that answers are made of. So you actually need your confusion, you need it badly! It's like a recipe for a Chinese dish. Sweet and sour are not similar but put together they make a fusion that is surprisingly delicious. 

Go and ask someone something you don't have an answer to.

Say thanks to your homo habilis grandma

I really ought to take more care in attending to and using my body, it's a machine that's been squeezed through millions of birth canals to be here now, growing and changing as it went, morphing behaviourally and physiologically so that now I have a big brain and walk on two legs.

We are the evolutionary inheritors of a technological process that is magic, never in our hands, to large to be within sight, almost to large to imagine. If you feel lonely imagine all the animals who made you, it's hard to feel disconnected when you're the child of fossils. 

Domesticity of the soul

Talking to a friend today she said that people keep trying to build houses inside her, I said I'm still trying to build a house in myself. It was such a lovely analogy, and I know the behaviour she alluded to - the desire to make investments in someone else, the desire to inhabit the edifice of someone else's soul. 

A house you build is built by you. A house you build is designed according to your desires, it's a colonial building, an extraterrestrial architecture. How can you design a structure for terrain that you've never seen? (and you have not seen the inner side of someone else's life). The resulting building is the result of your own projections and won't sit well in its surroundings... might sink into marshy ground, might look ugly, might be in a  desolate area despite being inside someone else.

The problem with allowing someone else to build a house in you is that you don't know what they'll construct. Even when you don't give them permission people unintentionally set up little shanty towns, dig moats and build windowless rooms inside you. Sometimes on the inside it looks like any large city: slums and mansions populate different areas but all are included. 

It's best to make your own home inside you because after all a house inside someone else isn't a permanent residence. Once everything is to your own wishes, ziggurats and domes, then welcome people in. If your house has enough space then there is no need for other people to build other houses inside you. If you like someone enough, build extensions. 

Listening to nothing in the midst of everything

Things make sounds. Sound of an aeroplane, sound of thoughts, sound of angry dog.
Things also have their own silences, silence of potential and silence of completion.

Silent potential of an egg,
Sound of the chicken,
Silence of extinction.

With so many dead things in the past and so many living things to come we're wading in silence, it just takes a trained ear to hear it.

The past is present

When I paint the Australian landscape I see in my images the hand of my grandfather, when I sculpt I see the humour of my father and when I draw figures and patterns I can see the beautiful work of my mother.

Human beings like stars are sometimes hidden. Stars still shine in the daytime, we just don't have the eyes to see them. As the sun sets they become visible, when I make things the aesthetic of my family becomes visible. And I love that.

Geometry of self

I remember my geometry teacher in primary school. He was special to me because unlike my normal classroom teacher we didn't see him all the time.

His eyes seemed to bulge out from his face, I realise now it is because his brain was so full. Despite having bulging eyeballs there was a deeper calm that radiated in his quiet attitude and smile. When the whole assembly had their eyes closed during grace I used to watch how his eyelids would remain half open with his eyeballs rolled back. The whites would scare me and I would think he must be very deeply involved in the prayer to not notice how uncomfortable his eyes must have been.

He taught us that to draw a circle with a compass you need to start by drawing a tiny dot on the page. Then you spike the dot and twirl the compass using mostly your fingers, not your whole wrist. Every circle starts with a point.

I feel like I am a circle and also a point, the point is the part which came first, which makes the rest possible, which has no direction or magnitude or dimension and the circle is the chemical elements, the atoms and molecules, the systems and combinations, the body, the television, the family, the architecture, the history, the pet dog, the feeling of hunger, the role of the sister, the role of the mother, the chewed fingernails. All things seen and learnt, all skills gained, all ideas acquired, all feelings felt, all actions carried through... The circle doesn't have fixed ambit because it seems to grow relative to circumstance. I think maybe it's nicer to consider it as a sphere (just to make things a little more wholesome).

And one day the circlesphere will be erased, and I'll be a point somewhere in space with no magnitude, no meaning, unattached. At the heart of our circles we're all points, and points are omnipresent.

Yearning, longing, dreaming.

Desire is never with us, it's pawing with a past relationship or pushing its nose into a half-baked chocolate cake. It never looks through your eyes, it cuts out little almond-shaped holes in a sheet of paper and hopes that the silhouette of eyes signifies sight. It's not entirely convincing, but like the concentric patterns on a butterflies wings you habitually respond to the illusion and are lead into assuming that when you see the object of your desire, you're looking with your innermost eyes, your deep set eyes that sit in the sockets of your soul. I don't really dig that, most especially because being desirous is essentially putting love beyond your reach in the past which is dead or in the future which doesn't exist.

How do you curb desire? I've no idea.