colonizing a star is tricky business

*Logo process 



 

*Final logo design

 

 

 *Rough Album Cover Design

 

Post class reflection for Process Work on Conflict in a Relationship @School of Making Thinking:



The movement exercise began with the left hand, which embodied a relationship we were in conflict with. Letting the energy of that individual fill the gesture of the hand, we facilitated the movement that arose, allowing it to grow larger, more specific.

It was clawing and grasping, my whole torso was a hungry mouth that my hungry left hand was trying to feed and it was filled with a muscular and bottomless possessiveness. It couldn't cover enough space in each sweep, so my left hand grew frantic, trying to pull from everywhere at once, ripping my body through space to find, to feed, to claim, calling more and more of my back body into action to fill the yawning cavern of my front body. Grunts fell through my clamped teeth, my lips in a thin, frustrated line like hers, letting my sense of her fill me completely, controlling my movements, motivating my breath, senseless with the helpless, blindly destructive quality of her existence.

Slowly the action dies away, coming to a stillness from which our right hand will eventually move from. There is a way in which embodying that dark force makes clear the feeling and motion called up in my right hand.

The right hand represents Me in the relationship, and yawns open like a flower unfurling towards the sun. I always end up seeing a little girl, when I do explorations of my self-definition in this particular class, but in the exercise, I AM that little girl, not just leaning down to talk to her as she stands in front of me. Focusing on the feeling of BEING this right side selfness rather than reacting to my left side darkness, I radiate cool white light as I turn my face up to some imaginary sunshine, and I scoop up what is inside of me, offering it up, reaching my right hand out hoping to put my hand into someone else's, curling my fingers one at a time around the hand that is not there to receive the gift of myself.

Letting the right hand expression slowly diminish, the left had is invited back in. As a conversation begins between the two sides we are asked to alter the intensities of right and left to explore the ways in which these essences overlap and respond to each other. Eventually my two different gestures begin to register in a dance that moves with the rhythm of breathing - the grasping consumption of my left side seems to be what give my right hand the ability to reach out, to offer myself up, to desire connection to other that lives just beyond my fingertips, just beyond my faith. The taking in and the giving away eventually lost their sequential relationship and like respiration at the cellular level, became a constant function of being alive, in and out from all directions at once, carrying me fluidly through space.

In the stark contrast I can see how I filled in the blanks for my first, most primal relationship, developing reactions and awarenesses in the places where my mother was blind or inefficient, so became a hyper functioning half of a Unit that could never allow me to sustain myself as a singular Whole. In the toxicity of my relationship with the Mother Principle, the only way to stop everything from being taken from the endless exhalation of my spirit was to sever the tie completely. So I cut it out. But without those unexpressed muscles in the form of another person, and a protective shield built up around that tender, bloody part of myself, I can only remain a hyper functioning half of a person, until I reach into the pulp and scar tissue and find a way to push the blood through, to inspire movement - to allow myself to be hungry instead of ashamed and embarrassed by it, so I might one day know fullness, so that I may give because there is plenty, not at the expense of myself. to learn how to inhale for every one of my cells crying out for breath. to inhale because I deserve to. because I need to, NOT because I am selfish. Because it is part of my job on this planet, in this moment. right now.


In a different class earlier that day, I had encountered a similar edge, but having spent most of my life proving to myself and the world that most boundaries don't actually exist - I slammed headfirst into a wall I didn't see coming. It seems I function the best inside of a fight response, it is pushing against these walls that taught me what I am made of. To counteract the boundary-less form of my mother, I have become a wall, a vigilante force, the boundary that no one else will give her. Constantly braced for impact, but without purpose when I am not going to war with a person, an idea, an edge, I throw myself into storm after storm, a necessary call to arms to fill me with adrenaline and bloody precision, only to lose focus and determination in the calm. In class the attempt at reaching out to explore with hungry fingertips disrupted my ability to function. Caught between a push and a reach something broke down in my sense of my self, which I had thought was limitless until I found this internal barrier, this wall of shame and fear, this place where I was not allowed to go and it took all of my body to contain the snot and the sobs that wanted to fall out of me.


In a developmental movement class this morning, watching babies roll around, and considering the different constellations created between caretakers and the infant axis they rotated around, it became clear to me that if I can only see my own troubled childhood in their little bodies and faces, than I cannot possibly see them, their individual expression of selfness. I must detangle myself from these life myths and elaborate defenses, or I won't be able to see past the colors of my experience to what actually lives inside of every creature that falls under my gaze. I don't want to wander forever in a field of my own ghosts.






"Interpreting the past is like trying to sketch a picture of the Grand Canyon from space."

Empty his pockets and Wreck his days.

Misconception is such a funny thing. Having someone's best interests at heart is an oxymoron, because in the end, we all see what is best for our own selves via someone else, and we view others through the goggles of our own perception. Some people's Rose is a little more blood red, other's, a vintage dusty pink, and the shade of our glasses cannot but tint every reaction we have to the world around us with self serving emotions. Not suggesting that is necessarily a bad thing, merely something to be considered as we encounter mentors and spiritual guides as we navigate the channels of our lives.

One of the most profound subtleties I've started to become aware of, is the legends in which we associate with, and how we drape these associations around ourselves, almost unaware of the stereotypes that cling to us in our views of the 'self'. The Jamaican Man who drives the company truck, has revealed to me recently a hint of the VooDoo Man, and as I have increasingly learned to unwind our discussions for the half truths and leading statements designed to tease out secrets... I am stunned by the intensity of spells he weaves with conversation, the cloak and dagger of familiarity and pretended disinterest so artful, so natural to a human being who may or may not even care about the messages and truths he tricks from his victims, but apparently plays the game out of force of habit and to combat boredom in his own life. Him being a Sagittarius, half horse and half human, I find it fitting that his speech is a half breed of truth and lies, that as the driver he is part of a much larger symbiotic being, literally a vehicle for transporting heavy equipment from the waist down, and that he bets heavily on horse racing, with a past he vaguely refers to as related to training horses in Jamaica. He often shares his lunch with me, with oxtail and whole snapper, and the most seductive jerk pork this side of heaven. But sometimes, as adventurous a soul as I am, even I have qualms with chicken feet and cow hooves as a main source of protein. As another layer into the hoodoo in him, he is quick to offer up bizarre remedies, a common one being to save a horse (and recently babies, to mine and my partner's horror) from colic, is to urinate into a bottle and force it down the affected creature's throat and force it to walk. Aside from medicinal wisdom, he often has very sharp, earthy comments about the interaction between men and women, and always relates it to strong sexual imagery that could just as easily be applied to any type of animal, so rooted in the animal world of male and female dynamics, is this man's perception of the world.

Yesterday I became aware of it for the first time, when listening to him describe how he tricked information out of someone, and watching his eyes rove along my collarbone and shoulder, down the the line of my snake tattoo and the blooming definition of my bicep, in the rhythm of casting a spell, a glance so strong it was practically a caress. There is something unsettling about his eyes, not in a negative way, but a lack of commitment to color maybe, and a jellied quality, like sunlight must travel deep through its clear surface to interact with the milky brownish color. When he smiles a true, wicked smile, you can see a good couple of inches of pink gums above his teeth, like a horse, in fact. In the sunlight, his glance as strong as  touch on my skin, he told me some of the secrets to the spells he casts, with a variation on his favorite tales from the Ghetto, and his own personal legend was laid bare before me, illuminated like the brassy greenish color of his eyes in the powerful afternoon light.

The time of the traveling salesman seems like something from wizard of oz, from the great depression, but I met one this past week. I'd encountered the owner of this global company before, have wandered empty Louisiana streets in the dead of night and drunk absinthe in the sulfuric aftermath of flaming sugar cubes on top of our glasses, and stripped off my boots to crawl around under aluminum structures to lubricate joints with airplane wax alongside him, this quiet, gentle giant of a man. Like the Jamaican Man, he too is a spinner of tales, but with very different tactics. While there is a gossipy Grandmother feel to Jamaican Man, the Traveling Salesman resonates with a Grandfather to the World persona, is like Oz himself, and in direct opposition to the control of others sought through petty human jealousy and guilt of the Jamaican Man in his VooDoo incarnation, the Traveling Salesman must inherently believe his tales, to convince others of the truth of his product as a direct validation of the truth of himself. He lives out of a suitcase, in a constant attempt to outrun responsibilities he has created, delving into emotional dramas and nuances of human relationships, protected by the image of the Grandfather, packing up and leaving before his vulnerabilities threaten to rise to the surface and expose him for what he really is. His whispering voice and sage like stories cannot veil his carpenter's hands or the strength of his sudden bursts of laughter, and in my recent conversations with him, I could distinguish the bias in his tone, an imperialism in some of his references, and with a blinding flash, I saw the death of the Grandfather he tried to depict, as it flickered out of existence leaving only the Traveling Salesman in its ashes, I felt myself become a matter of profits and not individuality, felt myself being played to distract me from my own visions of the future, in a desperate attempt to fortify his Emerald City with an offer of smoked green glasses. He does not see the world like the Jamaican man, as a separation between male and female, and ultimately as an earthy animal existence - but rather as a separation between animal and intellectual forces, and I felt it rather sharply when he tried to artfully, disdainfully suggest that I should be involved in work that was less animal, brutal, 'hairy' than what I am proudly involved in. Comments I barely noticed before, but struck me so fiercely in their destructive nature, I realized the underlying cords of much of this man's projection of self.

Discussing the disdainful tone towards my work with my shadow brother, us both possessing a little of what the other needs, just as often as I get locked into the image of the intellectual, he gets placed in the role of the brute and brawn, and people in life divorce him from the potential to develop a role that is in the region of possessing brains, we are the cowardly lion and the scarecrow, me searching for the courage to understand my own strength as I have always existed so easily in an intellectual plane, but never tested my body's limits and him, respectively, scared of admitting he has the ability to comprehend and synthesize, crippled by his own powerful fear of failure and a lifetime of being classified as the workhorse by society. Rising up from the working class as we both have, carrying our families on our backs from childhood, we are self made men, respect self made men, and agree when approached by the homeless, the junkies, we know every man can choose to make it , to build something, I so strongly believe we are all possessed of the power to define our reality, that I respect humanity enough to never give in to the feeling of pity, to never place myself so far above another man to look down on him and pity his poor existence, or to denounce where I am in life, like I haven't fought and earned every piece of what I have become, like it was a gift someone else bestowed on me, rather than something that I have built with the sweat and blood and tears of my own being and am wholly deserving of. A christian man, the Traveling Salesman, who often gets involved in reaching out to the homeless, will smile and joke with the beggar and junkie alike, he feels pity for their station in life, and shame tainted gratitude for his own in comparison, a successful businessman who, instead of taking pride in his accomplishments or relationships can only talk about his stained suits and empty wallet, broken love affairs and the time he cannot spend with his grandchildren in his constant running away from his own reality, as it dogs him around the world. His happiness then can only come in sharp, momentary, bittersweet bursts, before it is consumed by the shame of experiencing so animal a reaction to the world around him. So sharply looking down upon his own earthy nature, separating himself from eating animal flesh, as well as his own animal needs gives him a basis to look down upon the working man who lives within the context of his animality, a prison is created in the Traveling Salesman's mind, crucified by needs he so desperately fights to rise above as weakness, an intellectual inconsistency. He feels shame for the very things that make us human.

But the Traveling Salesman believes he is better than the brute, and wraps himself in Jesus to hide from his body's own animal tendencies, just as once, a long time ago, he made the choice to severe himself from the workbench, from the wood and tools, from the brutality of the shop, and lose himself in the cerebral world of building empires with  numbers and contracts and clever tales... that when the animal in him does lash out, thrashing in his blood and his memory, it shows itself in a negative light, because he feels such disrespect for it. The ego is there, the coercive undertones, without any true respect for what I want from life or the direction I am heading, and with a Judas Kiss in the searing afternoon light, I could see through his pretended ambivalent tone to the sneaky, imperial root of his words and his essence. He is the very thing he pretends not to be.

There is another, shifty eyed creature whom I haven't been able to shed light on yet, but he is somehow spawned from the Traveling Salesman, and the more I understand the Traveling Salesman, the more I begin to see the foundations of some of the other tricky beings playing larger roles in my life. My rosy goggles of perception have sustained similar scuffs as my literal glasses, wearing away at the subtle shades of poisonous cadmium, singed from the flame of the welder and darkened around the edges by my interactions with the many shades of human, from the brute force of animal instinct, to the snide superiority of intelligentsia.

Deep in my secret heart, I start to see a pattern in my broken sexual history, that maybe my own fear of that animal nature has found a way to decimate every interaction I have fumbled through and shut down in the midst of. Maybe watching with a child's eyes, I learned an intense disrespect for that part of my biology. Equally terrified and mesmerized by pregnancy, creating and raising children being equal parts intuitive impulses and cognitive responsibility, I dashed away tears and shortness of breath as I rode the train the other day, on my way to a baby shower for my shadow brother. The shower took place on the rooftop of where we work together, symbols overlapping and colliding like atoms, giving rise to new elements, and as the afternoon sun shifted into twilight I saw whispers of another powerful disparity between the personas we choose to associate with and their manifestation in reality. Young and fertile and feminine as a living Venus of Willendorf, in flowing coral against warm brown, gold dusted skin, this young wife and soon to be mother was herself the shadow side of the warehouse we work in, in glaring contrast to the intellectual child born of the woman who runs it, a labor of love for a shifty eyed creature living at odds with his intellectual and brutal selves, trapped painfully and disdainfully within the same body as he attempts to achieve the power of creation. I wonder if this kind of struggle can dry up the womb, by undervaluing our base nature, we further separate ourselves from the very things that brought us into existence. The young mother to be lost her first child, and her body was slammed with another pregnancy in the tide of grief following, she has existed in a suspended state of pregnancy, a year and a half of nurturing life inside of her, and the birth of this child will be such a profound and welcome gift in a family dense and dark skinned as flourless chocolate cake. The woman who's business we danced and celebrated life on top of has too, draped herself with the mother principle, has claimed some of her workers as 'mother', stemming from the imperial 'motherland' from which our country was loosely born from hundreds of years ago.

As she surveyed the baby shower preparations the day prior, from cameras that link directly to her phone, she issued a clipped and sneaky 'big mother is always watching' comment as we drank beer and watched each other across a table surrounded by fairy lights and trellis with Adam and Eve without the hope of conception, and the Snakeoil Salesman convincing us all to taste, the garden closing us in and winding up around us towards a full, ironic harvest moon.