Maybe we're all just spinning a yarn

Years after my father disappeared from my life (aged 5 or 6), post college, he began reading this blog and reached out to me. For a while I waited, to see what his game was, and email after long desperate email came as I considered how I felt about this person I only had the vaguest unpleasant memories about. As Father's Day approaches, I remember these emails, a mishmash of memory and fabrication mixed with what little he could glean from what I was writing about at the time. I am amazed at the deep and incredible strangeness of the individuals who's genetic material I am composed of, and the magical reality they seem to be trapped inside of.

That was almost a decade ago. I finally told him to stop, and that is the only exchange I have had with that man since I was a small child. Here are pieces of those emails:




ive been reading your blog for a few months now...you are an amazing young woman abbigale ruth walsh. (i named you, both) . i read your most recent post today....it told me it was time......damn.....i feel like i suffer from ptsd... i cant remember without reliving.

this is not an attack of your mother..... its a discription of my relationship with her. i hope other people had it differently with her than i did.

because i've read your stuff and i know you are a mature woman, im going to be honest and blunt... as much because its my way.... as because, you deserve the unvarnished truth from my perspective...so you will know why i made the choices i did.

i felt you would be safe with the hillbillies, at the very least. they loved you guys so much. ....i know there is no excuse. i was wrong.

first i want to say.... MY RELATIONSHIP WITH LYNNE IN NO WAY HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH TAD AND YOU. my nightmare relationship with her just made it so i had to wait till you were adults, and away from her to contact you. i never want to see her face or hear her her voice again. ever. you can tell her whatever you feel is important from this...if you never mentioned to anyone but your brother, id be ok with that, too.... but please... dont give her my email address.

you and your brother were the loves of my life. there have been two holes in my soul for 18 years..... but, i have accepted that it was necessary for me to be with lynne, because you and tad had to be born. and i thank the fictitious deity for your births. i hope it wasnt to bad for you guys leaving you with the hillbillies....i was afraid you would be "uninformed" at worst..... but that we could take care of that after you were adults.....i see you have taken care of that all by yourself abby....... mom would be so pleased with you.... .
i wanted to be with you all more than anything... i followed her around the state... drove hundreds of miles each weekend back and forth for years.....i tried to make it.......but, i had to go......my life collapsed so completely and the wound i had from my time with her made it so necessary. im so sorry.

im not a vendictive or hostile man. im a cancer with libra rising and pisces moon for gods sake......... i wasnt prepared for your mother... and then the death of my mother... then the loss of you guys and everything i had....... it was all waaay too much for me and i kind of snapped.

i was going to have her killed abby.....and then take you guys......i had the hitperson.. i had the alibi...i would have been 200 miles away........ i guess you can see that, obviously, at the end of it all... i wasnt mentally healthy.... she destroyed me and my life. my support structure lay in ruins.... she even took my best friend and pseudo business partner away... did she ever tell you the saga of "bruce"?.... my life was broken. when i met her i was an associate producer of news for a tv station with prospects to move up had a mercedes bens and a good life........ by the end of the "sentence".... i was homeless and broken with nothing left of my former life...except my mother's astrology books....YOURS. EVERYTHING ELSE OF MY FORMER LIFE... GONE....separated from my family and friends i ended up homeless living in a tree in island park in sarasota for a week.......


i didnt really come back from the whole experience of being with your mom and that time in my life until about 6 years ago, emotionally..... still not financially...... i was totally beaten down after 8 years in lynne's concentration camp.... she won... her anger, hostility and darkness were all much bigger and stronger than my light... which is considerable... but i was heaped upon with too many calamties at once....

i didnt disappear, abbigale.....i had to save my life. you and tad were safe..... i made a conscious decision...i escaped for what was only supposed to be a short time, to heal myself....I LIVED FOR YOU GUYS....i was in love with you guys.... you and tad were the only good things in my life... mom was recently dead.. my mother was the only OTHER thing in my life that was ever good. i agonized about it for weeks.....no matter what kind of cunt lynne had been to me....she was a responsible and good mother to you and tad....she had an extended family and a support structure.... her parents were good grandparents... no matter what kind of hillbillies they were or how much the old man hated me and everything i stood for.........they loved you and tad...i would have destroyed that and the opportunites that came with it.. had i stayed in your lives. just my presence there would have taken you away from that possible normal future. i decided that to keep interjecting myself in your lives would probably be selfish on my part.... which... now... after reading your writing.. im seeing, may not have been THAT normal... eh?

as a person, im sure your mother is good...i have personally seen her be very good.... but...not to me... your mother and i were always at the point of losing it with one another...as far as she was concerned, i never did anything right...(no one did)...(her dad used to call her the incredible hulk because she got so angry and hostile)..she had a quick, nasty temper and would say horrible cutting things....which shocked the hell out of me, because....when we first met, she was the sweetest kindest most loving giving girl i had known for a long time... till the day AFTER we got married....the day after we got married i brought the wrong shape of bottle of diet pepsi out of a 7-11 for her and it was "goddamn you you son of a bitch"... im not kidding..... i was in shock....right from day one. people who were supposed to love one another didnt talk to each other like that......more on that later..........i think she was always secretly pissed that "keith" didnt come talk her out of marrying me....... after living with lynne for only a short time i felt like a victim of shock treatments.....it took me a YEAR and the loss of my career in broadcasting to tell her... "kiss my ass"..... she threw an overnight bag at me..... (one time after bringing you and tad home to lynes house after a weekend together.... joe said to me with a terrified tortured look on his face, talking about some unpleasantness they had just had.... he said........"kevin... you know what she's like"....and... yes i did...i felt sorry for joe that night) after you all moved to gainesville... and i couldnt afford to follow...every weekend that i could ... faithfully,...i drove from tampa.... religiously every weekend that i could, i would drive hours to gainesville to get you and tad....then hours back to where i lived... florida is a long state.....to be nearer to you two, i finally moved to gainesville and i lived in a shack... LITERALLY... a shack in gainesville @75$ a week, for 6 months and got you every weekend... but i couldnt live on 4.50 an hour so i had to move to a city where i could make enough money to pay your mother CASH.....(which i did for 4 years till she told me "kevin.. dont you tell the state you have been giving me cash all this time.. because i have been collecting from the state too... if you tell the state you've been giving me cash, then....the people who are looking for you for your failed video business will find out where you are")..... the bitch threatened me.... for no reason, just turned around on me and threatened me... right on the steps of the courthouse in gainesville in 91 when our divorce was finally final. anyway... i moved to orlando.... and every weekend that i could.... i drove from orlando to get you guys....hours and hours on the road coming to get you .... going back to my house.....then a day and a half later... making the same 8 hour trip........ it took its toll on you guys... on me and the string of cars i went through.... i came.... and every time i dealt with lynne she was a cunt to me...the last time i came to her house to bring you home....unbenounced to me...lynne, i guess, had cleared out a storage locker in gainesville that i had rented and i couldnt pay for anymore...i had decided to let the stuff go.. (i let a lot of stuff go during my life with lynne).... but i guess when i defaulted, they called her and she went and paid the back owed money to the storage place... i knew nothing about this... when i got to lynne and joes, bringing you home....while you and tad were getting ready for bed....... i noticed "the spaceman".... then i noticed another thing or two from the storage locker...... stuff i had gotten when mom died..... and i wondered how they got to lynne's house...... and your mother, seeing my noticing the things... got this, cruella deville, face of victory and dispicable joy at my loss and this attitude of delight and satisfaction at my failure .. it was an evil glee at my situation....personally, i was happy you and tad had those things.... they were yours after all...( i have your astrology books when ever you are ready to claim them, a little more time worn... all with notations from your grandmother.).....anyway, lynne got this nasty and vile evil look on her face and things and started being a cunt to me... and things began to get ugly... so i left....that was the last time i could go there.

after the last time i went to take you and tad back to gainesville......the exchange she and i had, where she drew such delight from my loss and failure, that finally pushed me over the edge. and i was going to have her killed and take you away from her family for ever...much like her sisters husband did with THEIR kids.... did you ever meet lisa's kids? ....after a week or so, i called the hit off....i got hold of my senses and realized that would be WRONG, no matter how much she sucked.....i couldnt do that.... and i should just let it go. i realized... and was deeply saddened to know that as long as i was going to have to deal with her, to see you and your brother that it would be hell and i would want to kill her again... and probably do it...and how selfish i was being......and how it would negatively affect you guys. i realized that you would always be in OUR pitched battle....i came from a very unstable family situation..... it wasnt good........ i wanted different things for the two of you... so, i thought that with joe, lynne and her family to help, they could provide you a much more stable life.....and that i would always be a a very unstable element to interject into your little lives..... i decided.... that it would be best for you and tad if i allowed you to have a family, without the distraction of my crazy family...or my family history.... or lifestyle... i wanted you to have normalcy. and i would just wait till you were both adults and we would find each other...... after being with lynne for 8 years......my life was destroyed, my career was gone and so was my self worth.....after i left wink tv.. i couldnt keep a job.. i hated working in pizza kitchens....but that was pretty much the only avenue left for me to survive.....(in 89,.in sarasota, i was struggling to give her CASH for you guys and i lost my job.....then i lost my weekly rented room...i was homeless and she wouldnt even let me sleep on her couch for a weekend.) for me, lynne was a nightmare....after 5 years with lynne.... she had me convinced it was ME who was fucked up. so.... back to the orlando story...there i was and i had decided that while you were young, having me in your lives would be a drawback of massive proportion......... well... after a few weeks...and an inability to find more substantial employment than "pizza guy"... i decided.... "screw this... im gonna sell pot, acid and ecstacy till i save up enough money to get a lawyer and get my kids.... (not one of my best plans, but by then... my life and video production profession and family were gone and i was at the bottom... im sure i wasnt thinking rationally).......... 6 months after i brought you and tad back to lynne's house for the last time.... on 2/22/92... a guy i knew, who had been arrested, agreed to wear a wire in my house and it got raided....full MBI gear and masks... guns drawn...30 cops kicked in my door.... when i was arrested, i had a pound of pot and 3500$ cash... (i had been saving up for you and tad... i still have the xmas presents from that xmas for you guys)..... i was only in jail for 4 hours... but i was on probation for 2 years....and, at the same time... i had to keep selling to pay back the "people i worked for". after a while and my screwed attempt to wrangle up quick cash.... i had lost all hope.... everything i did pushed me further and further away from being able to get back to you guys..... i took to self medication...(also runs in our family).....i was eating my profits... because i was medicating at my pain of being pushed even further from you guys....it got worse for a while.... my situation never got back to the place where i could offer you and your brother anything positive...... so i decided to fix my life and wait till you were grown up.. and could make your own decisions. i hoped you and your brother would be curious enough to come find me. to yell at me... to tell me to go fuck myself. to meet me.... maybe to get to know me and to hang out some. just maybe to find out why you are so unique... (sorry.. thats from me... from my mom...quite the bohemian she was and she passed a healthy dose to me.. and it would seem....in the first 5 years of your life... to you too.... is your brother a freak too?? hehehehehe... sorry.. kidding.... we arent freaks. im just so happy you arent like THEM)

about your "spirituality"...i have a hunch about that.... if it is your wish that we continue communicating, ill tell you later.... i always hoped you and your brother would be curious enough about me or wonder why you all are different than the hillbillies enough to come find me and ask why....."why kevin, are we so different?" you and your brother called me by my first name and only dad occasionally. most people thought it was strange.....I kinda liked it. you both were whole people right out of the womb.

im so amazed at your talent...you are so fucking talented abby... and im so sorry for your deep deep deep emotional feelings and responses. you are a scorp with leo rising and moon within a degree of the ascendant. thats like being a scorp with a cancer moon and cancer rising.... thats how strong that is for emotionality........ you, my love, ARE your emotions. or at least thats how it feels. and will be jerked around by them until you can step back and look at your life as "karmic assignments".... you've got stuff to do abby. maybe with more than 3 people.... things will end... new things will begin. you have much to do. acceptance is peace.

your mother spins a yarn. your grandmother didnt have 7 husbands. but she did have an adventure of a life..... and she was a great, loving mother and astrologer and re-incarnation regressionist... and you were born 9 months, almost to the day after she died. and, about the worlock thing....dont let your imagination run wild.... lynne and i used to JOKE about the worlock thing...there was never any thougt of magic spells or magic books or anything like that...not like harry potter....there is no such thing as magic.....but there is power and energy and sometimes it sure feels like magic, doesnt it?..... we used the term "worlock" (or at least i did) as a term to describe a male with lots of water in his chart who knows about the occult and has the ability to perceive other people and what was going on around him and to influence people without much effort....someone who had the ability to reach out and grab you with their energy and make you want to know them....and then...changing people through the force of your persona......
its strong in my mother... strong in me... and it was strong in my children......for me, its sun on my midheaven. for mom it was sun on ascendant... for you its moon on ascendant.... etc.... i bet you know ALL about it..... leo rising girl...i bet you hold people in your sunny intense magnanimous gaze with great skill... i bet you influence people, simply by being you..... you have a gift far beyond illustration. the gift of your mind and soul can move people.
when you both were very young, you and your brother could mentally reach out and grab people from across restaurants....or rooms or wherever... tad would pick someone and "charm" them from across the room, months before he could speak. it was a great thing to watch. i hadnt ever seen anyone do it like he did before..... i knew when he was about to start... he would scan the room and search them out like a hypnotist looking for subjects..... and he would captivate someone... and own them....he would reduce them to squishy puddles of goo who had to meet him..... you too...you had sunshine in your heart...and you both came with it built in. and the dog thing with you. you both have a thing. with a thing.... comes a purpose. karmic assignments. have you ever felt as if you may not be here this time for "yourself"?

when i was 10, mom showed me how to do charts........... the math, how to research in the text books.....etc.... mom made me her apprentice. she knew early on that i had a great aptitude for astrology and the occult with my grand trine in water and fire..... with uranus and merc conj in leo in 10th... she always said i was born to be an astrologer.......... she was my mentor..... my BUDDY.....and my mother....... i miss her very much................one time your mom said... all snotty with me during one argument... "and you all write in your books... who writes in their books???" and i said.... "lynne... they are RESEARCH BOOKS"... not coffee table decorations..........

both you and your brother have the "astrologer/occult thing" too

so she says...."mom" taught her everything she knows eh?......... ok..........

one time..... young lynne... shortly after she and i had been "dating"....she went with me to meet my mom.. for the first time... and mom.... in one of her favorite flowery housedresses... (satin mumu)... sitting on her bed.......greeted us cheerfully as i brought lynne into the bedroom where mom was situated that day..... we sat and talked.... mom rolled a joint... and we all got stoned... and mom began telling lynne about karma and reincarnation and how the universe was the place that the religious folks told her it was.... and your mother was very stoned.... had never been in this situation before... and had never heard anyone speak like mom did before........i think for a second... she felt herself jerked away from the reality she had been raised with and she got this startled look on her face...... suddenly, she stood up and said...... "YOU GUYS ARE A CULT.....THIS IS A CULT....YOU ARE TRYING TO ...OH GOD....... IVE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" i looked at mom like ... whuuuuuuuuttt?????????? and your mother........... walked QUICKLY around the bed and pushed past me at the door AND RAN OUT OF MOM'S HOUSE........... HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH .... poor little farm girl from labelle............... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA................... still fucking cracks me up.... YOU GUYS ARE A CULT................................ HEHEHEHEHEHEHHEHEHEH. (maybe if she hadnt been so stoned)

anyway................ i followed her out to her little ugly chevette.... i really felt sorry for her... i tried to calm her...... i said... "lynne.... no hon... we arent a cult.."....."we arent trying to recruit you"............... she said..............."I HAVE TO GO.... REALLY."................. and she drove away....... i thought id never see her again...... but..... you and tad HAD to be born... so.....

another thing that just cracked me up about your mom...... we were watching something on tv about the second world war.... i was always fascinated with it.....and hitler......... and your mom told me....................... "you know kevin.. i always thought they were saying HI HITLER..... i didnt KNOW it was HEIL HITLER"........ every time i think about that it cracks me up...........

after spending WAAAAAYYYYY too much time with your grandfather..jerry bussell....".more than i ever wanted to"..... . i realized why lynne freaked out so much when she met mom .....

HI HITLER!.........

you’re not asking about a property of space, but rather a property of yourself

VII.
Ideas as Artifacts
Motion and Gesture
a part of our language
Narrative
an embodied form
of discourse


VIII.
Immune System
as an act
rather than
an organ


IX.
creative drive
sex drive
death drive
thumb drive
disc drive


X.
interface
what is our human boundary
when we modify ourselves (as a human race)?
race against what?
techno hack vs body hack
genetic modification vs microbiome
integrity of the body (modesty)
replacement organs
anxiety as an artifact


XI.
How do you heal the landscape
without erasing its history?


XII.
The difference between Sacred and Rigid:
Holding Space vs Space being Held

Community holding something is different
Than a Structure holding something

Am I the Container
or am I contained?


XIII.
Memory
is a person a thing a process?

identity/structure

is the meaning in the words
or the person who hears them?


XIV.
a transition that feels
like there was no
transition

twisted geometries, centerless plans, and shards of glass and metal

Post class reflection on the nature of memory and its relationship to object:

We cannot deny the idea of Sacred Space, that it is something everyone finds somewhere in their lives. Maybe it is the comfort of cooking and embodying a kitchen. Maybe it is the yoga studio or gym where we take an hour or two to reclaim our bodies, to remember our movement and breath as belonging to ourselves, after all the other time spent using them for money, to accomplish other people's tasks and priorities. It could be a church, or going home for the holidays, a museum, a forest.

Where does the resonance of any of these places come from? Was the kitchen inherently sacred, or was it the actions of my body, repeated through time feel like grooves already existing on a cosmic record, is it my memories clawing their way out of my subconscious to breathe a few more sweet breaths of life? The worn floorboards soft in specific places I find myself standing in declare a physical truth of other bodies and lives having been lived in this space, with that evidence, how can I deny the possibility that some piece of them isn't alive in my apartment still?

Memorials offer a concrete and visceral relationship to our past. The act of burying the dead was one of our earliest distinctions of man being no longer ape, and though the shapes of mourning continue to shift, our need for marking what we've lost has not. Things like the 9/11 memorial remind me of Indian burial grounds, where the generations of us who experienced it are unable to release the dark energy of that place. It is now a place for the dead, and for some time, no new ideas will grow in the space that was made. That loss is defined by the massive emptiness of its design, allowing us to stare down into the footprints of giants and imagine what it felt like to still be alive inside of a dying star. There was a shift that we may not even be aware of yet, in what we consider the patriotic heart of the USA. This is a dead end. But we are far from processing why it manifested in the first place, so maybe this part is necessary before we can move on and reclaim it. Maybe it will be a scar that remains forever.

Maybe like the ruins of Pompeii it will have to be forgotten and rediscovered much later, so we can fold it in to our collective experience, humanizing our past and giving us permission to live inside it for a moment of empathic time travel. Much like the voids in the ash that we filled with concrete stuff - turned ancient people's last breath into a truly physical experience, allowing the distance of time and the most elementary human experiences seem so small and so close to us in the here and now. Like seeing a million Jewish children's shoes at Auschwitz, or every hand that has ever touched the ancient Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and Juliet's Breast in Verona, or stood next to a stranger and looked at art on a museum wall, it is the mundane and repeated that unites us - we are connected through the touch of our fingers and eyes through time and space to something true, to ourselves and each other as part of the fabric of humanity.

The idea of temporary 'memory-less' structures with lightweight rigging and tent fabric made me think of the kinds of things that get erected in the aftermath of devastating weather/land shifts. I suspect that, whether or not the intention is there - something primal exists in the idea of shelter from the 4 elements - that confining the 5th element (ether/space) is vitally important to survival. That if you strip away the noise of culture, shelter is almost like a platonic solid of being. The human body is two walls of muscle, front and back, wrapped around empty space at the center. Plato suggested that god used this 5th element/solid for arranging the constellations in heaven and Aristotle also postulated that the heavens were made of this element.

For many artists there is an inherent fear of the white page, the pregnancy of emptiness, filled with potential that we may or may not be able to live up to the brevity of, and when I translate that to bodies and buildings, I am reminded of the coral reef, whose act of shedding skin and bone become the building materials of its residence, like certain bone cells in our bodies literally produce the fibers that they construct their environment with. How a build up of history and resources and skills and marks on a page are incredibly important - which I build up quickly through a wash of graphite powder and light pencil measurements to escape the scary expanse. There was a time for the behemoth buttressed churches and rose windows, and there is still so much evidence on our landscape of that part in our history. But while those communal places of worship were being constructed, the shifting human narrative suddenly saw us as children to God, our Father, and all the deep wisdom about the human body from ancient Greece was lost. The paintings of this time look like children's drawings. With the industrial revolution, defined after large scale slavery, the free market helped change our relationship to self in our story. Maybe the communal and collective experience was no longer the church, but the factory. Maybe as we were turning the body into a machine, there remains a reciprocal ghost in the shell of these old factories as the lines between the two were increasingly blurred.. As industry left and continues in America to shift to information/insubstantial, these old industrial bodies littering our collective periphery are the churches of the 20th century, and worshipped at the altar of Capitalism, of the self made man, who was born as blank as a white page in Locke's estimation.

I don't know that we are far enough removed from that place and those ideas to wipe out the proof of that part of our history. We may forget, and have to repeat it again if we can't slowly start to reabsorb the polluted land, for what it represents, and allow it to grow and mature past the intentions of its birth along with us. Just as Penn Station being destroyed gave birth to the Preservation Act, we cannot always see the lineage we are apart of - things we create or destroy or ignore or forget or never notice have implications all their own, and we may never cross over or come in contact with them, they may have a rich life all their own.

 

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
You may give them your love, but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,...
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."

- Khalil Gibran

 

 

 

it's because you taste like home.

At the movies with a handsome carpenter on christmas, I had one of those moments where I remembered who I was, and the true value of what I am doing. It is so easy in the entertainment industry to get lost in the brilliant waste, of building concerts and spectacles only to ride home on the subway and hear the audience members around me open and close their mouths with debilitating, complaining negative noises about the experience I gave the labor of my body to, for it to have manifested for these ungrateful bastards. Seeing the newest Disney Princess confection (Frozen 2013) the best part of the movie was hearing the reactions of the children around us, especially the loud "Huh?" every single child uttered when the prince/boy did not save the day. Discussing the newest line up of Disney princesses with some of my close female friends, all of us with a vested interest in the genre, as a large amount of our college friends have ended up in the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks world, it was fascinating to note the extreme and different reactions we all had to the different stories, what we resonated with was so much deeper and more tangible than the barely more than skin deep princesses that defined our concept of femininity, destiny, self worth and true love in our child selves.

How would my mother and grandmother be different, if they had these kinds of Disney characters in their earliest memories and associations?

I witnessed, in that audience, the shift from previous expectations and the happily ever afters my generation and those before me chase, crumbling under the weight of failure... and I saw the future change. As much as movies and tv shows are crafted for children to sell a ton of merchandise, more than make something beautiful, there is an inherent shaping of culture that is taking place, and it may be decades before the meaning underlying the medium of transmission can fully reveal itself in our adult incarnations. Stories like that of Wicked, and soon, the movie Maleficent, go back to the stories of our childhood, to look at what happened through a different kind of historian's eyes. The new Batman movies, and Daniel Craig's James Bond focus on pushing our boundaries of right and wrong, black and white, bringing us into the shadows that our existence is actually comprised of. Allowing children and young adults to weigh motivations, to feel for what was previously considered the 'bad guy', to see past labels and unlucky situations is giving our youth the ability to come into their own with a much deeper awareness of the depths and feelings that trigger the responses of the people around them. Buying that ticket to see that movie, that crappy princess Merida costume, those Batman action figures may be feeding into the mindless consumption that some of us struggle against, but when our children pretend to be these characters, they are embracing the depth that WE as the makers of entertainment have given them.

It may be that the only way to truly experience/engage/affect culture is to be immersed in it. Maybe to be above it, or better than it actually separates us because we are stepping out of our time and its realities, and become disconnected from time altogether. If a handsome stranger running from an unpleasant past hadn't walked into the Columbia Restaurant in Sarasota Florida and made eye contact with a youngish woman who hated her father, sometime in the late 80's,  I wouldn't have had the silly, sweet voice on the phone with me last night, listening to my panic attack about my career - my sister would not exist without the holes created in our mother by her father, who then allowed that handsome/horrible stranger to alter the direction of her life. those threads are necessary in the grand design, and to go back in time to fix those holes would alter the entirety of the universe. It is because of my grandmother's 16 year old self, writing letters to a handsome young man in the air force that my mother grew up broken and angry, a cause and effect that we can have no cognizance of how it will ripple the future, how that 16 year old's first love, sometime in the 1950's may still hinder the positive choices I make in my personal and sexual relationships now. Memories are as real and tangible as atoms, they construct the realities we live in and the things we choose to define ourselves by. They are real, and they exist in this time, because we carry them with us, using them like divining rods to navigate the future. We are carried along by the momentum of simple actions, getting up in the morning, buying that cup of coffee, the smile one gives a stranger whose life may be altered by that simple muscle twitch, evolved from southern manners an individual cannot escape. The feelings of a 16 year old in the 50's resonate with so much momentum, they are still swimming around me in the now that I exist in, in such a real, unbreakable state, just as real and powerful as Elvis's pelvic thrust in defining culture and moving us all forward. Just as I may have atoms from exploded stars composing my flesh, so too are moments from a past I will never know reflected in the anatomy of my own unique existence, and every choice we make is a ricochet of those 'past' atoms, colliding and making 'future' atoms, no different than matter and anti matter, just unnamed and undiscovered by the science community yet - the 4th dimension, the undiscovered plane of existence that we are unable to see as a scientific reality because we are still so emotionally sensitive to it.

Some of us, 70 years after the great depression, still cannot walk past that huge value bag of greasy potato chips that their grandchildren will never eat, because some part of them is still caught in the scarcity of the past, on repeat, like a scratched record, or a ghost, walking the same hallways, doomed to live a traumatic event over and over again. Some people repeat their parents mistakes, or continue to fall in love with the same kind of man, at the expense of their children's safety over and over again, stuck at a point in their development where things ceased to change, to grow. Like the past atoms became a cancer, that multiply and fill them up with a time they cannot escape and are doomed to repeat. I also know people that are so afraid of the past atoms they were given by their parents, they choose to only live in the future, and are caught in a time warp of working and planning so strong, they cannot even see that they are missing out on their lives in real-time (I was caught up in too many past atoms once, and encountered someone filled with future atoms and flaming red hair, and a few conversations with him exchanged enough mutually missing atoms to balance that I could move out of the mistakes I had been repeating. Those conversations changed me and my entire life path). And some of us are taught as children that there are no boundaries, that we can do and be anything we want - some of us learn it the hard way, later in life, how to get past the skip in the record - and some of us have been doing it the whole time without ever realizing the power of our actions and self explorations:

Change is time travel. It is dependent on one's emotional state and their concept of boundaries. To disrupt the waves of poor choices or bad memories carried throughout history, to stop and actually effectively choose what kinds of momentum you offer to the universe intimately manipulates the future in ways so far past our ability to see, it is when we are fully present, to give positive ideals and experiences to the collective waves into the future, the rooting of and knowing of self in our own time and cultural history that we actively define the next generation, what matters to them and how they see themselves. Just by living more deeply than our parents and with more awareness of self than previous generations we are laying a stronger foundation for the future.

I saw it for a second, the future, like a flash in that dark movie theatre, and I no longer doubt my ability to be a part of it.



"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood

the last gallery show i was in (that i got featured in the new york times for), the series i did was based on the concept of that miscommunication/misunderstanding of our worth in relation to our female sexuality (that it could, in fact be directly linked to a higher form of spirituality, but our mothers never realized that potential, and let society continue to brand it as shameful and 'naughty', so could never teach us that it could be a source of good, let alone related to our own divinity) and this negative expression is passed onto us from our own confused mothers, and their confused mothers, something that defines the types of partners we choose, the fathers and grandfathers i had (awful men, all of them) and that is a similar feeling i have about watching my mother and grandmother's terrified and almost superstitious relationship with money, and the things they consider to be rewarding (fast food, sitting in front of the tv and shitty lattes, rather than eye exams/prescription glasses/ability to see properly, nourishing/high quality/healthy food, yoga/bike/anything active) and on into infinity. especially right now, as i am the only member of my family to have moved out of florida (little sister recently changed that too!) i feel like it has given me the distance and objectivity, as well as vastly new and different stimuli to consider (while they continue to ruminate in their own juices and reinforce their misconceptions) to really breakdown some of my learned behaviors towards my sexuality and concept of worth, men, food, taking (real) care of myself, money etc... and it seems to have resulted in this disconnect with my heavily female based family, where it is like speaking two completely alien languages, and our concepts of everything are so different it makes conversing practically impossible, particularly due to the fear base from which they respond to everything, reinforced by the whiffs of the baptist church my family is bred from.

that series of work was really just the beginning of my being able to bring some of these gossamer notions into a more concrete understanding of actual concepts and breaking down and restructuring neural pathways that have been built to receive and log information in very specific ways from my early cognitive development. then i come across articles like this (i've read stuff about this before) and aside from making me feel more rooted to history through my genetic ties, strikes me deeply as i may be wrestling with precognitive conditions gifted to me from such major events as things like the industrial revolution, potentially harboring a distant, glowing link to eve herself, stripped of the power of creation (babies), something truly beautiful and awe inspiring, divine even, by being made to feel it was born from a shameful act, forevermore a condemnation against that powerful place in ourselves that possesses the power of god and was turned against us/her - relegated to nothing more than a ball and chain forced on her by a man she did not choose (adam).

i think this kind of stuff should be talked about more, i think, for people like the ones in my family, it may be the only way to establish a bridge to speaking my new language, with its foundation in logic and rational self awareness. i know its just a boring science article, but i think the concept could potentially be much farther reaching:

 http://themindunleashed.org/2014/01/scientists-found-memories-may-passed-generations-dna.html

The Collectively Dismissed

Stephen Hawking and a number of biology and physics theorists have come to the lofty conclusion that " the whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired". The subway taught me this. Life has taught me this. But when reading the theory of relativity, which redefines reality as consisting only of contextual truths, which perpetually vary according to our mass and speed in space and time (which has conceptually become the same thing in science, aka spacetime) I begin to wonder what then becomes of Memory.

The proposed 4th dimension, if we were all to travel at the speed of light, exists as a continuum where time=light, so by moving at the speed of light, we are also moving at the speed of time, and the future is behind us, with the past at our fingertips in front of us. If history is possible, time travel must be possible. Perhaps the laws of inertia are in play with humanity, and we simply haven't ricocheted in the opposite direction into Unhistory. But if we had the profound ability to go back in time, would we hold on to our memories and relics of passing ages and people? Is this proposed 4th dimension somewhat of a key into the Collective Unconscious, that there may be an overlap that hints at the future experience? However scientifically learned we may become, one serious thing cannot be accounted for by space and time and quantum physics. This aspect of reality is as contextual as any other aspect, and reading the flow of history, of movements and recessions, temperature fluctuations and the resulting human reactions, we move with a force and depth of emotion through spacetime that makes the powerful evolution of a river much more appropriately used to describe history from its emotional/human side than for the Time association of the word History. OR maybe they two are intimately and inextricably connected. If Time heals all wounds, speed of time changes according to our emotional output, that it is possible to wait forever and remember forever, it seems Emotion is also a definitive aspect of our definition of reality, an ethereal quasi-component to the dimension we exist in: EmotionalSpaceTime. Emotion+Time=Memory. History is a Byproduct of Memory. Without the ability to remember what came before, we would not exist in Time. If we didn't exist in Time, which is equal to SpaceTime, we would not exist in Space. Without our emotional context, we would not exist at all.

Keeping that in mind, my recent New York explorations brought some interesting questions and observations to the surface. I recently moved off the island of Manhattan to the very close Jersey City, overlooking the spiky New York skyline and I quickly became aware that Ellis Island lay within a quarter of a mile of the New Jersey Coast. My history classes never mentioned New Jersey during the decades of Immigration booms, no book I have read has mentioned the obvious proximity to the rest of the country the short ferry ride to New Jersey is, and that only the immigrants bound for NYC actually traveled from Ellis Island to New York. Everyone else was shuttled through NJ. The Gates of America are in New Jersey. Why is it so important for us to believe that New York was the major port for immigration? Ironically enough, the Island itself was a tiny little thing that was increased through landfill as it grew to be able to hold the massive numbers coming in through its gates, and after the 30's and into the 40's, when immigration dwindled in the face of America's Great Depression and Wartime Era... it was simply abandoned. Forgotten. A profound symbol for so many of freedom and citizenship was stripped away by its lack of prescence in our Collective Memory and became what it truly was when looked at with no emotional context. It was a fancy building falling in on itself, floating on an island of trash off the Jersey Coast.

Ellis Island started to draw photographers in the late 60's and images from the rotting walls and remnants of beautiful architecture from another time began to surface, spawning a new interest in this important axis of our history. It was rebuilt to its original splendor and turned into a museum. The bizarre part is that what came from this place was profound amount of ethereal Emotional things... there is an overwhelming lack of physical objects, because you can't SEE citizenship, or joy, fear or freedom. We seemed to remember that Ellis Island was an important piece of our cultural development... but walking the empty halls, it seems like we have forgotten why.

There were some interesting three dimensional graphs about the number and types of immigrants, and obviously, to fill the space they had to be really creative - these graphs will be something i will never forget, due to the power of their symbolism and ability to impact you with a sense of the weight of what they were there to show. There was a number that did jump out at me, one I have never encountered before. According to the map detailing the (forced) influx of slave labor, it appears that the amount shipped to Brazil is HUGE in comparison to the amount that came to the states. Huge. Have I ever heard in a class, read in a book that there was even slavery in Brazil at all, let alone probably the most massive number of forced immigration in the America's history? No. With that startling revelation, my profound respect for the power of context strikes me particularly hard. Passing thoughts about our obvious sense of guilt as a country is apparent in our intense focus on our own slavery history, versus memories of talking with brazilian exchange students when I was in high school. I remember during one conversation I mentioned the Holocaust, and these exchange students, seniors in high school, had no idea what I was talking about. Images from the Holocaust are burned into our developing minds starting in the sixth grade, and American school systems make that a required section of every year of our education until graduation. Who defines what is important? History itself depends on the person telling it. There is so much bias and emotional context, History is a constantly fluctuating line, and just as me and my brother have differing memories of the same events in our life, History is a grand Memory. What is truth? We can all talk about God, but his face in our minds would be different to every single person due to their frame of reference. He will have a deep rumbly voice like someone's father, kind crinkly eyes like another's favorite Santa Clause, the one they went to the mall to see every year. One is black, or has almond eyes and dark lashes, a pot belly, is loud or gentle, embracing or stonelike and stoic.

Coney Island is going to be torn down - another relic from desperate times. P.T. Barnum and his contemporaries were the light in the darkness of the Great Depression, their bullshit and cheap thrills the only thing that the masses of poor had to lighten the monotony of starving and working and having nothing. I'm surprised no one has stepped forward to save some piece of this rich thread in the tapestry of American History, embarrassed when I saw how dingy and silly and falling apart it looked in comparison to the grand vision that resided in the recesses of my Collective Memories. Another symbol of the stuttering heartbeat of our culture, being washed away by the flood of people and their Greater Needs. What happens when we erase these pieces of history - the egyptians defined eternity through memories, and to wipe away someone's potential for eternity, they merely had to erase every picture and mention of that person's name from their records - when there is no emotional context, people who could remember these places and why they meant so much are gone, these places do not exist in space... will they cease to exist in time? Will they cease to exist at all? To continue on towards impending future and create new memories from our own context instead of just from a previous context of the people who will be phasing out during our lifetime, do we have to let certain memories go?

I recently saw the World Trade Center site for the first time. That is an event from my context, the images from that experience burned into the Collective Mind's Eye of my entire generation. A freshman in high school, my classmates and I spent the day wandering like zombies from class to class, sitting in silence, watching in horror as the trauma continued to unfold in front of us - every TV in the school stayed on. And we watched, and watched. It was not a Holocaust. It was not a Great Depression. But in our young lives, it is the only, the first and the closest context we have for the politics of horror, and the powerful feeling of helplessness that are the definition at the base of all of those things. They are building a museum on the site, and I am stricken with an odd sense of futility and devastation. We are consciously letting go memories of the light in the darker times of our development as a country, but forcibly declaring our priorities on remembering an act meant to strike terror in the American people.

And I wonder what will go in this museum for 9/11. Pieces of desks and unidentified human remains? Melted glass windows, and post it notes with meeting times that somehow survived? What is it that we are really looking to remember, and like Ellis Island, what physical objects could possibly convey the powerful emotions that surround the events of that tragic day? Like everything else, I imagine it will eventually fall from society's context and no longer be reality. It will be replaced with new memories.