and I said to the star, "Consume me".

 

 

As my yoga apprenticeship draws to a close, I am engulfed by waves of feeling that are completely unfamiliar to me. I have one class left, and am already mourning what may be lost in my day to day. I had thought my previous class was going to be hard in my emotional state, but as soon as I walked into the studio, the wash of calm came over me, and I was too filled with a sense of rightness to feel anything else.

Having the break from construction work, from constantly having to ignore my body's needs to serve someone else's purpose, the teaching and taking of yoga is such the opposite - reminding self and others that conversation with body may be the most important conversation of our lives - the push and pull in such opposite directions feels almost like choosing between life and death in a very real sense. And that starts to bleed into other aspects of life, like expression of creative self, of feeding curious, hungry parts of self, of inspiring growth in self. So I have looked with clear eyes on other parts of my life that I am giving time and energy to, but will not render out into something I want to be or have in the future. Sometimes we need things, like habits or jobs, to keep us moving forward into some kind of future and sense of security. But there comes a time where those things can begin to hinder us, because they are easier to continue doing, than to explore our boundaries and move beyond them. The yoga reminds me how much more is to be had inside of my own body - all of the things we aren't taught to explore or question or listen to. If, the more we do something, the more we become it (the mind AND muscles develop neural pathways and bulk up in the areas we exercise the most), the feeling of rightness when I walk into a yoga studio makes me increasingly aware of the opposite feeling in other places. Of how much more there is to be had in Life.

So I have been slowly turning down the freelance jobs I get offered that I am more than capable of doing, but that feed a future I am disinclined to be a part of. A lot of the entertainment work fosters aspects of the economic and cultural structures that I am finding myself fiercely against, and what is perpetuated in real lives that feed that machine, which only cares about money. But as I let those things go, so too do I lose the power I had to fulfill other people's needs, to be filled with and validated by achieving other people's desires and deadlines and budgets.

And the people that formed vast networks of support and deep understanding of the worlds we crawled around inside of together - the farther I remove myself from those layers of knowing and getting through the bullshit together - the less connected I am to those webs of people, as the similarity of our priorities and experiences evaporate. There will always be love, but our beliefs about our needs and desires are suddenly diametrically opposed. Awareness of the subjugation of our flesh and time and soul incites a revolution against those things, and not everybody is ready to fight that battle. The cost seems too great when you have learned to look at the value of your flesh as relative to the value of money.

Those things have meant life to me.

I learned so much about how to wield my body with power, how to use my words to move small armies of men with precision. I was able to find things that were stripped from me in childhood and rebuild a powerful seat for my soul. But redefining my sense of power means allowing myself to be emptied of previous concepts. Refusing to be defined by other people's needs means I have to let go of the feeling of being purpose driven by them. I must become a Vacuum, before I can be filled my own needs and my own purpose.

I never anticipated feeling so uprooted, because I have never had a sense of being rooted to something. The sting of feeling disconnected, untethered to time and space, and my sense of where I exist in proximity to those things has become suddenly overwhelming. But like the practice of pouring ourselves into asanas (yoga poses), something that shows us how we respond to intense and unfamiliar territory - I have always backed off too quickly to reach whatever lessons may lie on the other side. Missed out on the strength that may be born from learning to feel without running away. Of course I can't take anybody with me on a journey inside myself - turning inward is a necessarily singular path, even if I mourn the loss of what I once had. There are different rules in this game than ones I have gotten used to playing, so I have to let my habitual reactions fade away as they do not serve me here. The ways in which I communicate needs and desires will inherently have to change, as I navigate a landscape that has no map, and all of the external images and associations I've consumed in my lifetime can provide no assistance to an internal compass.






We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
- Jack Gilbert

 

 

 

 

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

When death is coming- the mockingbird doesn't sing, but speaks with his true voice.

I was reading a potential client's manuscript on a Zombie novella to be turned into a graphic novel, and I was stricken by the similarities of all zombie subject matter I have come across... and even more deeply stricken at the inner discussion I had with myself whilst trying to find value and meaning in the idea of undead cannibalism. Lots of undead creatures and their storylines carry romantic notions and deep seated stereotypes based on human/animal tendancies, just as comic book super heroes are born out of a social outcry for superhuman profoundness hidden in the everyday life we all drag ourselves through. But who has given a Zombie depth? Being defined by emptiness, they are silly and horrifying and utterly disconnected from everything we know to be true about human and animal nature, and the subhuman dysfuntions that twist the two planes of existence together to enfold the genre of horror... and here are some of the interesting visual + philosophical conclusions I came to in my line of questioning:

So the basic framework of any story is based on 3 variations of conflict: Man versus God, Man versus Nature, and Man versus Himself.

Prior to reading the manuscript, after having perused the descriptions, I find the director/writer is focusing, or actually assuming that his conflict is Man versus Himself, as both the fighting with the ranks of unaffected humans and previously human attacking the remaining human. To me, the conflict is highlighted/triggered by Man versus Himself... but is really a profound discussion of Man versus Nature. What defines us as different from the rest of the animal world as a race of mammals is a certain level of conscious thought. We draw the line between cro-magnon humanoids that shared the planet with us, and our actual ancestors/earliest civilization by the first primitive death rites - the act of burial and marking the resting place of former loved ones (as well as ancestor worship). Pretty much everything that was considered "magical" throughout our developmental history has through science and medicine been defined, ie. pregnancy and birth, disease, weather, fire, domestication and agriculture as a way of always having food, and we have ceased to have magical illusions and associations with these things. We don't pray for a successful hunt and honor mother nature for the gift of fresh meat, we walk to the store and buy it. So the one clear mystery that persists, along with very specific culturally defined rites that follow it, is the concept of death. Why am I telling you stuff you already know?

1. I passed by a ghost bike the other day (you know, the white spray painted bikes that are chained to places where someone was killed in an accident?) and it struck me for a couple of reasons: by marking the spot where the life/soul/whatever animates us left the body, it shows a modern evolution of rites relating specifically to the loss of consiousness rather than the physical body. If we were suddenly placed in a reality where the person died but their body remained suspended in animation - how do we mourn? would we not feel compelled then to mark the place where their individual conciousness ceased to be? This ghost bike phenomenon is interesting also in the fact that we all see it and instantly reckognize what it symbolizes - and businesses, police, hobos do not touch them, either out of respect, cultural acceptance of the act, or superstition. I feel like a society suddenly focused solely on dead/undead trauma as a constant reality would manifest symbols and markers and become a common phenomenon in a decaying landscape. So in a modern society, I think we should consider what kind of symbol could be used to illustrate that, and how it could be visually effective in representing loss in the number of deaths as being overwhelming, and potential danger.

2. So if what separates us from animals is our consiousness, what then is left behind in a body when that is no longer there? I have two answers for that:

First I would say is the animal insticts, particularly smell. But when considering how perfect a machine the human body is, I would also argue that there would still be lingering muscle and mental memories that begin to fade as the body eats away at itself. And smell has an amazing ability to trigger emotional responses. If young animals separated from their mothers can follow the intimate knowledge of their mother's scent, why wouldn't a baby zombie be able to follow its (living) mother's scent? And it is situations like that which really shake us to the core in a supremely deep way. In a similar manner, I could absolutely believe that an old, old man who took an early dawn walk every day for 55 years down the same path, would still feel the muscle compulsion to continue certain habits that the body has repeated for years and years. Like a scratched record, like a footprint left in space and time.

And second, I would say, like wearing a wedding band for years and years and removing it for some reason - death or loss of some sort, I'm sure there is a very profound sense of having a physical hole where it used to be, where you'd feel the empty bed like a bitter and lonely void, that maybe you yearn to fill with what used to be there, but nothing will ever fill that exact shaped hole in your life, heart, space or time... imagine how a body would feel if it suddenly lost all consiousness. We never see zombies eat a body down to the bones. They never do more than take a bite and move on to the next thing. I feel like the act of consumption could represent a hunger/yearning for something else, something that living people have that they no longer do. Something that disappears the minute they bite into the living, so they are no longer interested and move on to what still possesses it. If it was a matter of blood and muscle and flesh, there is plenty of stuff out there for "dumb" creatures to consume. I think the idea of the zombie started as something very different and has been blown out into something that makes no sense. The closer we bring it back to something that we could almost believe, the more poignant and devestating the effect will be on the audience.


Here were some of my extraneous thoughts on treatment of the story and characters/wordplay:

I like the metaphorical play on consuming - we as a consumerist society buy the next big thing, take a bite, and once the newest/better version of it comes out, we toss the original and move on, never satisfied, always hungry for whatever is next. I'd love to suggest that by littering the environments with ads we reckognize universally, like Haddon Sundbloom's Santa Clause that Coca Cola used to define what Santa looked like to the rest of the world, particularly the US. Utilizing ads from older time periods is both ironic (suggesting how it lead to a land of zombies) and helps us to obscure the time period.

When breaking down the action of the story, and what needs to be shown, I would root out sequences that can be suspended in time, imitating slow motion for anticipation purposes. The movie '300' was not a perfect one, but I still watch it for one reason: the fight sequences. In that particular movie, the fight scenes move from body parts flying to an abruptly intense pulsing slow motion, and the movement of body and fabric ripples and flows across the screen. The underwater oracle dance is equally mesmerizing to me. Also consider Muybridge's animated horse sequence, broken down frame by frame. By isolating action (while subtley shifting composition for dramatic effect/reveal of dangerous situation or character) we can control the pacing so it doesn't lack moments to breath or focus. We'll basically be mimicing camera moves, slow pans, slow zoom outs and such while breaking up the flow of the story to agitate the viewer.

Throughout history we have used many different ways of marking a distinct separation between "us" and "them", like the nazi symbol, and the yellow stars for the jews. I would consider developing a symbolic marking that separates the military, doctors and civilians. That offers other ways of insinuating disloyalty or making unspoken allusions.

Just some thoughts I had.