The menage a trois

There seem to be two kinds of people: those who want to spend less time by themselves and those who want to spend more time by themselves. Recently I've been of the latter persuasion, and have caught myself wishing to be alone more often, to be less accountable to others, to just be allowed to not talk - maybe for a long time.

Last night as I lay in bed thinking about all the people I had to contact, all the issues I had to somehow resolve and the best strategies for neutralising them I felt the coarse wool of anxiety getting slowly wound around my heart by a pair of hands that pokes through my ribs (all calloused and spindly from ceaselessly working) and I thought to myself "If only I could just be alone!" and the only person who heard it was myself, meaning that I was alone, but had surrounded myself with other problems so much that I felt and believed that I was being crowded. The only person I cannot be away from is myself. I'm always here, I just often forget to say hi to myself, which is rude.

Here is a story I was told when I was little: there was a rich guy named Yajnyawalkya ("yudge-nya-wolk-ya") who was married to two wives, Katyayanee ("cutya-yaa-ne") and Maitreyee ("my-tray-yee"). Yajnyawalkya decided to leave his wealth and all his material goods and go into the forest, but before he left he asked the permission of his wives and told them that they were to share his wealth equally between them. Katyayanee gave her blessings and agreed to accept half the fortune and remain in her husbands home. Maitreyee was more curious, and asked what wealth existed in the forest that was more valuable than the wealth Yajnyawalkya had acquired economically and socially in the city.

Her curiosity led her to follow her husband into the forest, leaving behind her former life.
This is a story about you. The two wives inside you are your alternating tendencies of clinging onto possessions, comfort and familiarity and the tendency to let go, to renounce, to follow the unknown. When you feel stuck and bound to situations it is Katyayanee giving you a big sad hug, because she likes your company and would miss you dearly if you left. When you realise (as I did last night) that you are actually free to follow and abide with that silent self who leads you onwards, Maitrayee is putting on her sandals. But you don't have to go into the forest to be with yourself.

Mess

I appreciate spaces that are intelligently organised and beautifully presented.

So why is it that I don't frame any of my work? Why do I keep pairs of shoes I was given when I was 13? Why do I let books and paper and artworks commingle in stacks? Why do I stick halfbaked drawings up and let them congeal in my conscience for months until they're as dull and disinteresting as the colour of the walls (my walls are cream)? 

When it comes to university I can organise my ideas, when it comes to teaching I can organise materials, relationships, knowledge, spaces, when it comes to work I can organise time - why don't I carry it through into my bedroom? This space is the vessel that houses my history of interaction with the material world, and I treat it like a shoreline: leaving jetsam strewn around.

Essentially, realising my apathy has forced me to realise the root of my apathy: in a way I have felt worthless, and so I let myself have things messy and unkempt and old and worn out. And I think I pushed a crowbar into my cranium and that feeling of deficiency breeding in my brain leaked out and became an insensibility towards possessions and a desire for poverty of beauty.

I think in a way my father might have had a similar experience of manifesting his self worth in the material world. His personal possessions amounted to clothes and a mattress and later in life paper, ink and a drawing table. 

Another point of interest is that when I was small the people I loved the most were dirty and messy, and it's true that places of mess are the ones more inducing of fun - because you can't help but feel frigid inside a museum-house. I like the organic evolution of mess... the trickling of objects across space. The hints of chronology, the pleasure in archaeological discovery, the mapping out of actions. My grandpa was an artist and his loft was always shifting. I liked going to look at all the things up there, the different palettes encrusted with a variety of hued nuggets organised according to his decisions whilst painting, brushes of different thickness's: some sitting in clay pots, some fanned on a desk, one wet with mineral turpentine resting and oozing into a rag. 

My father was close friends with a man whose home was essentially the unfolding of an elemental and instinctive creativity advancing into three dimensions. Atop a mountain coated in forest, girded by giant creaking black bamboo sat a low and long living space. I couldn't tell you what it was all made of, what parts came first and how it expanded, but the main space was a wide, deep raised verandah and perhaps the roof was made from fabric. He lived alongside pythons who came to nest in the sheltered environment. There was musical gear and recording equipment set up on the verandah where I can remember I spent a long time playing keyboards under a large spherical objects (perhaps it was a globe) and maybe there were other hanging sculptures too. Our other family friends were always messy, my mothers close friend had hands that were always cracked and coated in glue from her artwork, her home was spread out into three little cottages and one bus. My dads other close friend really had no home, but had many beds, many rooms, many vehicles of all different sizes built for land and sea (but all shipwrecked), many books, many newspapers, many artworks, many weeds, one horse and rust on everything. And all these things were compiled into junk yards which are now only frequented by an adult with fond memories of childhood, waist high grass and big red kangaroos. I miss these people because they're all dead, so maybe my mess is in communication with the past.

A sense of chaos underpins those spaces.

Peeling skin

I love girls who stand up for themselves. I think I might be one, and I might just love myself for it. A little bit.

Imagine an apple. Imagine it's shiny taut dappled pink and red skin. Imagine that the flesh isn't floury and isn't tart - but sweet, crunchy, juicy. I think you might be salivating. 

Stop.

Humans have an innate way of twisting the universe to fit a human world view, to the point where we think that apples are for eating. The function of apples is to make more apples. We throw away apple seeds. What else do we throw away?

In the dark heart of apples are tiny magic stones. I am a tiny stone with magic properties right at the core, so when others confuse me for food it can be upsetting, disappointing, confusing, aggravating. A lot of people when they look at you see apple skin. Some people look through you and see the silent weight of potential. 

The outer part of me is a bit queer, in the homosexual way. It's a disgusting feeling having your skin peeled and flayed and devoured and your core thrown away by your family. My partner is one of those girls I love because she stands up for herself. And that's really hard to do when other people have misjudged your preferences in this material world as being the most defining aspect of your being, because the opinions of others - regardless of how self determined we are - shape us and can convince us.

Here is an invitation to all the people who have, are currently, and will at some point dispose of the innermost part of me whilst using my outer self to feed your ideas; to acknowledge and disregard the phenomena that is my sexuality because when you get distracted by that, you call me a "human doing". You reduce me to my actions.

Instead, call me a "human being", a thing that exists on a plane higher than mere action and decision.

Preserving a snake in a jar

In this society time is a snake who eats you, you're off to a painful start with teeth and it's all constriction and acid thereafter until death (what's more symbolic of our growing mistrust in the afterlife than snake defecation?) Time has got it's parts: you pass through ribs, through a small intestine, through a large intestine and you slowly break down over the duration of the journey. That's how white people see time, a winding living line that you pass through, marked by stages. On the whole, it's not a trustworthy beast. In the end it will destroy you.

I'd like to try and describe other ways to know time. I've caught glimpses of them, but it can be difficult to see time in a way that is incongruous to how you've been raised, in a snake. Some people don't measure time in increments.

The passing of time is meaningless if you are aware of what's happening now. You are always here now, except for in the times when your mind is not here, now, and is instead preoccupied thinking about the snakes teeth or the snakes anus. The past and the future are essentially lost on us, but we are constantly putting our minds in those dream worlds. If you pluck your head out of fearful contemplation of the snakes sphincter and open your eyes to focus on that which occurs in this very moment; time becomes less linear and you touch omnipresence and eternity. Because, after all, every thing that has existed and will exist can only exist the present moment, and there is no other time than right now. 

Priorities

Even when I have $7 in my bank account and no food in my fridge I am a happy person if I can talk with people I love and have a piece of paper and some ink.

Just a thought about writing

DE BEAUVOIR: Just  how can one tell what are the words whose association will act on the reader? Must one trust in the void? Take the plunge?
SARTRE: Yes, you chance it. After all, you have reasons for chancing it.

So, my reasons for taking chances with writing are related to two important lessons about human behaviour presented to me by one of my teachers at uni.
The first lesson is that politics is in everything, not only between nations but between two people, between two grasshoppers, between a can of tomatoes and a raw tomato. My can of Italian tomatoes flavoured with oregano travelled a long way, packed in and taped up aboard a boat. My can of tomatoes undoubtedly cost more economically and environmentally than my tomato I grew in my backyard. Tada: politics.

The other lesson is that conflict is notoriously present when interesting people get together to do something productive.
So long as I can find interesting ideas and characters, no matter if they are incomprehensibly unrelated, pushing them together in writing creates conflict, power struggles, a jarring dynamic, politics. It's the process of making a crude reflection of human behaviour, so that readers recognise humanity in the words and are, as Simone says "acted on" by literature.

My efforts in writing have been lax recently. Some time, brain willing, I will explode again.

Perfection

I know a Sanskrit prayer that I learned at school, it translates to

That is perfect
This is perfect
Perfect comes from perfect
Take perfect from perfect and the remainder is perfect
May peace and peace and peace be everywhere

Unlike numbers that are liable to be divided, Hinduism says perfection is not lessened and doesn't somehow decrease when it is divided. I started to think of humans as a prime example, endowed with a full gamut of emotions, thoughts and behaviours and capable of producing another human endowed with a full gamut of emotions, thoughts and behaviours.

I can't think of any thing or entity other than life itself that is not diminished by extraction or duplication. Even the proliferation of cancer cells is the blossoming of perfection in their infinite capacity to reproduce perfectly functioning disease cells.

Energy isn't lost or created. It just rotates around the universe weaving in and out of living things like a big tapestry.