Maps lie, but they also organize how we see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

its been all day, so it's getting a little fuzzy. I was on the subway, which always looks like a roller coaster in my dreams. there was some confusion about the train I was trying to switch onto, and whether I should wait, or take whatever came and simply adjust my route accordingly. In my hesitation, I didn't make it to the train I was trying to take when it came, so I decided to walk the length of the platform to kill some time. The platform went on for at least a mile, and it was grassy and filled with bodies milling about like the Coney Island boardwalk in high summer.

The sun beat down on us, but the mood was festive, and there was a path that turned off the grassy knoll of the platform. Somehow I knew that I was still inside the world of the train, so wasn't worried about having to pay a new fare, or the inevitability of my train eventually coming. Just up the path was a massive dog with a long greyhoundish face. He was as large as at least two horses combined, and rolled around on his back in the sunshine as a regular sized dog nipped and bounced around him, playing like siblings. A woman in gypsy trappings with strange, heavy lidded eyes - eyes that whispered a thick, hard to decipher language of their own - stood in the dappled shade of a tree nearby, watching the dogs rolling around in the grass. She was about to teach a class, and she invited me to join. I don't remember even noticing the other students, but was cognizant of a rich discussion taking place about the link between fortune telling and psychotherapy.

I don't know how many classes I took, but I found myself alone with her in the sepia toned house she lived in and taught out of. there was only natural light, and I couldn't tell if her eyes had a color of their own or simply reflected the surroundings, muttering to themselves. I remember washing dishes in her sink and asking her questions. She listened with coy amusement, but her eyes listened too, and the rest of her. It felt like multiple creatures inside of her also listened, to my questions, to the underlying earnestness that filled my body, the awe I felt at being allowed to exist in her presence, how desperately I tried to gulp in all of the information I was taking in around me - including her answers, which weren't really answers. I asked how she came by such a large dog. She described to me the dog's process of teaching himself to grow, first the spine grows long, next the back legs or forelegs, but always paired front or back together becomes large. It was the same process for him to shrink himself, and he writhed beside her as she spoke, obtaining the low-to-the-ground shape of a daschund. I glanced over my shoulder at the other dog, and looking into the shadows of the couch arm it was perched on, backed into the wall next to a closet, I realized he had become a cat with black fur except for around his mouth and paws. Maybe I was looking at a cat that had taught himself how to be a dog, or maybe it didn't matter what his shape was, I would have recognized his selfness no matter what. He glared at me fiercely, trying to melt into the shadows as my eyes tried to define his shape as a separate shade of darkness.

My dreamself was starting to suspect that She was actually Me and I didn't want her to know, so I allowed my sudden hunger to flood my senses. The only food she had was a bunch of miniature hamburgers, but before I could poke fun at her about the strange sizes in her house full of shape shifting things, a pressure in my bladder brought me up through the layers of sleep into the early morning light. After taking care of my needs, I knew my own dog must feel similar, but I had been sad to leave the presence of that woman in my dreams and jumped back under the covers, trying to meet up with her again for a few more moments, or to see if my train was going to ever come.

My dog snuggled her nose against my feet and fell back to sleep with me.

 

 

 

i glow the way unwanted things do,

 

 

 

like the charge of electricity in my body last night, humming so fiercely it woke me up

the crackling, static filled line that draws a new connection in the vacuum
from one shoulder blade to the other 
after exploring ancient reflexes together, as we unburied them in our bodies

I am discovering that I am a conduit

Shortly after yoga teacher training, I woke up in the middle of the night and knew I was about to be touched somehow. there was a buzzing at the base of my spine, the sound of water rushing in my ears, and slowly like the humming vibration of an instrument gradually increasing in tone, my entire spine felt like a faucet of water being slowly turned on to full blast, humming heat rushing through the spinal column and I was paralyzed. it didn't feel bad, but I was scared of the intensity, scared that as it grew more fierce, I might not be able to handle it, and that there was no one for me to call out to for help

right as my fear peaked it began to dissipate. god doesn't give us more than we can handle. I am full of walls. I am a labyrinth, and I am lost inside of it

I can feel the edge of that energy right now as I write, a low hum that will eventually express itself, but this time I am ready, I recognize the electric vibration in my sacrum that has nowhere to go but up, to ride the roller coaster of my spine and I can feel a response in my palms, static, like a storm rolling in, charging the air. there is no question, only clarity

My hands. pathways I was too scared to allow in are like the invisible map drawn by a negatively charged surge of electric potentiality from sky to earth. when negative and positive collide against the ground, the hull of the vessel, my body, electricity takes every path available to it. a lot of time is lost in looking for the route, the root, territory that needs to be mapped out so the energy knows where to flow like water without losing the spark, the light, the power - instead of wandering, searching for a path, exhausting itself

 Like lighting that rises up from the ground, I am a conduit

All I need to is find the shortest, most efficient pathways in
the electricity already knows what to do

 

“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”

― Warsan Shire

 

Lightning happens when the potential difference between the clouds and the grounds becomes too large. Once the voltage reaches a critical strength, the atmosphere can no longer act as an electrical insulator. First, a stepped leader is created at the base of the cloud which is a channel through which electrons in the cloud can travel to the ground. But while moving towards the ground, it searches for the most efficient (minimum electrical resistance) route possible. It does so by traveling 50-100 meters at a time then stopping for about 50 microseconds, then traveling another 50-100 meters. In this process it also branches out looking for the best route. As the stepped leader gets close to the ground, a positively charged traveling spark is initiated on some tall object (trees, towers etc) on the ground. The traveling spark moves upward and eventually connects with the stepped leader. Once the stepped leader and the traveling spark have connected, then electrons from the cloud can flow to the ground, and positive charges can flow from the ground to the cloud. This is known as return stroke. But this flow unlike the flow from up has a well-defined shortest route now. This massive flow of electrical current occurring during the return stroke combined with the rate at which it occurs (measured in microseconds) rapidly superheats the completed leader channel, forming a highly electrically-conductive plasma channel. The core temperature of the plasma during the return stroke may exceed 50,000 K, which makes it shine so bright.

 Lightning is also known to occur in dust storms, forest fires, and volcanic eruptions.  Particles such as sand, smoke and ash, which exist in these environments, can also become electrically charged and create atmospheric conditions similar to that of a thunderstorm. 


 

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."

As if all the stars you've seen have been busy looking back,

                                                 *sketches part of early design process for a logo/brand/identity



Nausea, in the space above my belly. Am I making 'stillness' up, by holding my muscles in a certain way?

Allowing the effort to drain away, everything starts to gently shift on its own, eyes closed, as I listen to the muscles negotiate with each other. Rolled and buffeted by space, her voice  washing over me like being inside the belly of a wave, far out past the break, swells of potentiality that subtly shift the direction of the ship of my body. Anchored in space and time, moored by my feet engaging with the surface I stand on gives the rest of my body permission to get lost in the drift.

Internal currents, muscular chatter like gulls on the breeze, hard to tell if I am an object at the mercy of the ocean, or if I am the ocean itself in this metaphor. Sea sickness subsides when I allow my frame to rock with the waves of information and sensation rolling through me. Sunshine pours in the windows, I can feel the brightness against my closed eyes, and after what has felt like a lifetime of winter I can almost smell the salt.

I finally recognize you, Priestess.




Walking my dog to the coffee shop, on our way to the park one early morning, the sun was just kissing the tops of buildings with its blushing warmth. Glancing up at its trajectory, I noticed a small square bit of fabric on a long stick, swinging in wide arcs from a rooftop, upsetting a large body of pigeons that were taking up residence on that roof. They wheeled around it, a wide ribbon of birds moving as if of one mind, like rippling fabric, or an intelligent wave, and alighted right back where they had taken flight from. The flag disappeared, and a face materialized at the edge of the rooftop. He saw me see him, so he waved. I waved back.

I've only seen that flag waving and the birds responding a few more times. But the pigeons are always there, obviously comfortable in their multitudes, and I wonder what the nature of the flag is, what his relationship to those birds might be.

Pigeon Lord(e) was the name that came to me.

Once, last summer, I saw fireworks outside my window, in the late afternoon. Confused, I watched for a few minutes, and finally realized that it was those birds, that mass of pigeons moving together, the deep pinkish gold light of the setting sun bouncing off of their wings in flight.


*A week after I wrote this piece, a massive fire destroyed these buildings and all of the pigeon coops on top of them, the existence of which I discovered in articles writing about the events as they unfolded. Walking by the aftermath, in the light of day, I am distracted by the calls coming from a few pigeons circling above the twisted walls of the buildings, possibly crying desperately for their home and companions who couldn't escape the flames.




On a gig recently, working an impossible amount of hours was overlapped with a huge amount of hours taking classes, and the shift from inward to outward looking manifested abruptly, the seams beginning to show. Like a computer trying to function with too much material on its hard drive, I had little control over my output, and I could see  at one point the artlessness of my responses reflected in my boss's face.

There was a handsome man on the labor crew I was supervising that persistently angled for my number, smoothly uttering promises of sexual delight, euphemisms that quickly began to repeat themselves, no matter how firmly I refused.

But he was engaging in a different way than most of the guys. His sexual banter was focused around the idea of taking care of me, rather than taking something from me, and maybe in the midst of not taking care of myself, it struck a bizarre cord, one that is never quite so exposed. Following that subtle thread, I laid down next to him during lunch, on the floor underneath the structure we had built together. I asked him random questions, considering him as he chewed on his responses. It didn't take long for him to shift toward sexual references, and I asked him 'What if I don't like sex that much?'.

His eyes may never have been as beautiful as that moment when he turned his head to look at me, seeing through his projection to what was actually there for a single, solitary second, realizing that everything he had said had been the wrong thing. I may have proof in that glance that I am more than just a figment of other people's imaginations, a mirror, a ghost.

I understand now, how the seams we try to hide are the places where the identities we've crafted break down, because they are lines we have drawn onto a thing without lines, boundaries we make to contain our own potential, a way to know myself as SUPERVISOR to make up for a lack of knowing who I am beyond that context in any scenario.

I understand now, that what I am looking for is other curious people, and that curiosity lives inside of people from all walks of life, not just in either the intellectual or the physical planes and the people that inhabit them - the mind body split isn't a split, but a series of mismarks on the map, a confusion of languages at the intersection of material and immaterial. Curiosity is the thread that connects us to each other as sentient beings, it is the blood that flows through the veins of the creative beast that lives inside of all of us, however it chooses to manifest, if we let it.

I gave him my card as a reward for the look in his eyes, for the possibilities it made me aware of. Lets see just how curious he is.

a seated figure with a sword in her hand,

 

 

The other day I received a text from the mother I haven't spoken to in almost 4 years. Usually I'll receive something whiny or conniving from her, trying to figure out what would be most effective in inciting a response from me.

I opened the text, and it was simply a photo of a man sized purple rooster sculpture.

I had no clue why she would have sent that, maybe she was trying a new tactic, maybe she had lost her last marble. It wasn't until I was describing it to my little sister over the phone that its meaning finally struck me.

Purple Chicken.

Years ago, my mother would load up my younger siblings into the car and prepare for a road trip to different Podunk towns to go visit my step father in one of the many penitentiaries across the state of Florida. As a repeat offender, he ended up in places we would never have traversed the flat ribbon of road and scrub brush to stay in for a few nights, for a few hours of visitor time on each day of the weekend. I went to watch over them, my only family. I stayed awake as we drove in the endless darkness of night, a large worn atlas in my lap, my younger siblings (his children) asleep in the back of our massive 78'chevy nova, the one with 8 cylinders and no speedometer. It was practically a boat. My little brother and sister fought like cats when they were awake, all claws and teeth and slaps and screeches, but in the back seat together, the always slept shoulder to shoulder, head leaning on head, looking so similar they might have been twins.

The freckles on my little sister's sleeping face will be forever merged in my mind's eye with the stars in the huge, indigo, bowl shaped sky that we drove under, dwarfing us against the landscape. Delilah kept us company on the radio, listening as people called in to ask for a song, and to tell her their lovelorn stories. I learned so much about sadness and longing and the pain involved in loving someone, on those midnight drives, and about these individuals living their entire lives in little spread out towns with less than 500 people and only one church to gather in, that loneliness can seem as vast as that sky at midnight sometimes. How perspective and priorities can be engulfing or freeing, depending on the context.

We began to notice, my mother and I, that almost every gas station we stopped at had large photos advertising a fried chicken bar inside. The Florida sunshine had bleached away the yellow shades needed to make brown tones, and had left washes of blue and pink that pooled into dark purple in the crevasses of the fried skin of the pile of drumsticks. Once when she came back out from paying for gas, her nose wrinkled, she told me that the photos weren't lying about the color of the chicken in that particular establishment. It became a joke, asking if anyone wanted any purple chicken before we ran inside to pay, even years later on other kinds of road trips.

Its a tangy sour memory she brought up with her text. Its impossible not to feel a sharp twinge of almost nostalgia, for childhood where we laughed so we didn't have to feel the horror of living our specific reality. Impossible to ignore the intimacy of that shared experience, something that no one but the two of us could really fathom in its fullness. What I find unfathomable is that she probably cannot conceive of the images it calls out of my body even now: of my then-newly ripe, pubescent body, terrifying in its stark sexual suggestiveness that seemed impossible to hide in the baggy clothes I draped myself in, being offered up to this adult world I wanted no part of. Shaking my bra out for the guards, rarely women, before we could pass into the room full of inmates and their visiting loved ones. The stepfather I hated, openly talking about my budding body, how large my breasts were getting - to my mother, who giggled inanely, unwilling to make the boundaries I could not, unwilling to protect me in any way. Right in front of my young siblings, embedding god knows what into the brain of my baby sister, about her body and its boundaries. Feeling naked in that prison visiting room, undressed by the words and eyes of the one person I hated most in the world with no one to defend me, while he stuffed himself with Hot Pockets from the vending machines, since the prison food was so bland.

Since I had to construct my own shield, without parents to protect me, I am finally starting to see how the truth of my upbringing bubbles up and chokes me as I wade through deep and thorough intellectual territories. As a creature living in between worlds, my inheritance is unclear, everywhere I go I feel like a little bit of an imposter. I can't tell what character I am in my own story, so I don't know what my boundaries and freedoms are composed of - that my background will invalidate me in a room full of thinkers and theorists, realities of a brutal animal existence that dispels the beauty and symmetry of so many ideas; that I can't possibly be as experienced as I am in the labor world because I am white, college educated and female, everything I have must be from my privilege made manifest, rather than the blood and sweat and tears and rage and hunger of my human body.

What is my domain, my territory, my home? How can I be defined by the sad, gross, backwater world I was raised in? And how does denying relationship with so much of myself hinder my relationships with others? How has this shield become a wall, this shield that has defined me for so long, who will I be without it, but that voiceless, pubescent girl, naked in a room full of strangers?

silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes,

 

 

dreams continue to surface, now that I am stepping farther and farther from the place where I worked my body ragged and fell easily into deep and dreamless sleep. The past two nights have felt like a waste, like I am doing hard work even when unconscious, and there is no rest in my body when I open my eyes to the murky winter light.

alone in a house that's under construction, but there are so many different houses, a long miniseries of moments before it is a different house and different circumstances. Sometimes I've been running from someone, but I only know that because of the foreboding feeling as I build a small nest of blankets and pillows on the frame of a couch and turn on one light above that space, to protect me from the overwhelming darkness contained in the walls and rooms around me. Twice I was avoiding the windows, the eyes of people looking in. I surveyed a space that didn't look or feel like me, its trapping unrelated to things I would value, but felt my only choice was to hunker down and wait.

Sometimes there was a man trapping me in, a slender gangster who barred all my exits, surrounding me with the innards of walls, the insulation foam spilling out, the studs exposed. In one episode, I talked to him, throwing my arms around him coyly, bargaining for my safety. We both knew what I was doing, but it pleased him. every time I put my arms around him, he doused us in clean, clear water escaping from a broken pipe. As he walked away, I wrung my hair out, fat drops of water striking the floor.

In the last episode I only spoke to him through the wood of a caution taped door, and while it felt as though I could make the wall give way with little effort, I knew he would see, so paused to consider my options. As I looked around, I realized I was in my childhood home, and suddenly saw my only escape route was out the window in my mother's room. Still staring at the piece of door in front of me, I saw down the hallway to those windows, the colors of her bedroom, the blue sarong draped over one particular open window blowing in a breeze. It was the window with the gardenia bush underneath it, and the pear and apple trees that never fruited, a few paces away, and it was sunny and refreshing and free outside of it.

When I opened my eyes, the fabric hanging of the windows in my own room let just enough light in that I could distinguish the pattern of the wind as it blew snow back and forth, weaving as it fell.





A few months ago I dreamed I was on a construction site that had torn everything down, but the foundations of a house. In the dirt, I came across a vessel, a pot like those we dig up in roman ruins. Inside, sticking out of the hole in its side - was a fish, stiff from using all the muscles in its body to try to breath. I picked it up, filled with respect for this creature managing to stay alive in an environment where it couldn't even breath, and I knew there was water underneath the foundations I could put it in. The foundation resembled a roman system for radiant heating - small columns at regular intervals sustained the weight of the building, but allowed heated or cooled water to be poured underneath, to suffuse the floors with the temp of the water. As I let the fish slide from my hand, I suddenly understood that it would move towards the source of freshest water, possibly finding a current it could follow to a more habitable place. Curious to watch it feel and respond, I lowered myself into the narrow crevasse between concrete and dirt. My pelvis got stuck for a moment, I had to tip it sideways to fit. Underneath the concrete slab, my fish was following something it could taste or feel, but it passed other fish like it, suspended in animation, mouths wide as if gasping for breath, frozen in place. Something inside of me knew that since my fish had been so long out of water, this little bit seemed rich in something that suddenly had been too little for the others.

I don't know what ever happened to that fish, but I do know it is the same one that has lived in my chest for years, the one I never notice until I am asked to commit to something, and it begins to flip around in desperation, as if it suddenly doesn't have water to move through, to breath in.

the Lacrimae Rerum: the tears in things.

I wonder if Architects ever think about what their building designs will look like in the rain, hugged tight by haze, or the season's first snow.

Walking to the train, down Lexington Avenue after a late job, I noticed a building I've never noticed before. Wrapped in fog, light from its top 6 floors reached out and caressed the low slung cloud forms. Were all of those lit shapes offices? Was that wall of light a modern day beacon of some sort, drawing Suits to the Capitalist flame, declaring our cultural values? In the semi darkness it looked like an animal, like it was shifting in its skin, prowling in place, as the fog rolled and fumed, covered parts and revealed others. Is it a creature of the future or the past? A beast of steel whose veins run underneath the city streets, is it a shadow of Titans who walked the Earth before Man, chained to the earth so we could rule? Maybe the shifting weather is the only chance it has to breath, to contemplate taking a step, of freedom, of sighing and swaying in the wind and snow.

Of course it looks alive, after two days of me consuming nothing but coffee in the depths of the Armory, with its giant steel ribs. I always think of Jonah, trapped in the belly of the Whale. The Armory follows me home, I woke up later, throat so dry I couldn't breath - the moisture stolen from my bound-water-being by the dry floor boards, by the thirsty mold growing in the rigging. My sacrum talks to me of the weight of my brain, my skull, thoughts and frustrations dripping down my spine for days with no reprieve. The heaviness pools in my pelvis, I can feel the pressure at the place where hip becomes thigh, a sneaking strain at the joint that feels like the femur may just fall loose from the socket in exhaustion. I wonder if that is why buildings groan. Maybe I rest my body's weight in the center so I can stay light on my feet, so I am never caught rooted in place, never unpacking my bags. I'm a ship, not a tree. A fish pretending to be a fox.

Peeling off my clothes, I notice the familiar subtle rash I always get from places like the Armory, especially in the winter. The Piers are the same way - once, in Pier 59, after days of crawling around on my back underneath platforms that barely cleared my chest to bolt the floors together, someone told me it was one of the places the rubble from 9/11 was stored to pick through for body parts. Was it the pain and fear of so many people's final moments that seeped into my pores, my skin broken out in anger, my nose leaking with black mucus? When I finally had time to shower, the grey of my body melted and pooled around my feet, in retrospect, I wonder whose skin it was that I had shed? Is dust from buildings not intimately related to the dust of our own skin cells? Will some of these buildings sink so deeply into my flesh that their elements become tools for my bone cells to construct their crystalline homes, my scaffolding, my stronger-than-reinforced-concrete structure?

If those resourceful creatures use what they are given I must have bones made of coffee, of lack-of-sleep, of lost time.

Will I eventually/potentially pass on some deep genetic memory of those buildings I have labored in, the minerals, chemicals, psychic energies finding their way into the blood lining of my womb, into the breast milk that may one day nurture my own hybrid creature, born fractured - part Selfness, part Steel?

Love me like the Earth itself

 

 

 

 

All we wanted when we harnessed the power of Agriculture, was a place to put down our own roots. To leave our mark in Space and Time, to grow wide in all directions, but also to know ourselves, separate from everything else.

All we wanted was it All - strawberries in Winter, to be forever young, to never know Cold.
Freedom from the constraints of nature, of our ancestors, of time... even as we reveled in their riches.

Maybe we did not know the nature of what we wanted.

Any other time of year, these past few balmy December days would have been deemed beautiful, perfect. Why is it anything less than that now?

Because it isn't following the rules?
Because it is Unusual, Unfamiliar?
Because, maybe it is becoming too familiar?

How fiercely we cling to traditions honoring these ancient relationships - between seasons and harvests, stories of survival and familial warmth, of resilience in the fine articulations of soul and flesh that carved pathways through dark times, cold times to here and now - but we have long since moved beyond those relationships' ability to regulate our lives. Tradition feeds economic structures now, instead of our hungry hearts; motions we blindly repeat instead of things that inspire us to act.

What will Winter mean when it is a story we tell our children?

When our children's children live in a world of eternal warmth, will a creeping coolness strike fear into their hearts because it is too Unfamiliar?

Instead of the inward turning, Loss-of-our-Leaves, Death of Identity that Winter asks of us, perhaps we are now required to live inside the identity we've crafted for ourselves. Have we not clamored for most of our history to find our way back at the Gates of the Garden? - for Eden too is eternally warm, where everything fruits out of season, a place where time does not pass and we never age. A place where our only responsibility is to not question Authority.

How desperately we have toiled as the Human Race, to replace the Laws of Nature with technologies to Manifest our every Desire. Closer and closer it comes, out of our own mythologies, to walk amongst us.

Why then does it strike us with fear?

cazimi, or “in the heart of”.

I haven't dreamed about bridges since I was really young, 4 or 5 maybe. It was always the bridges my mother later told me were probably the ones in Tampa, but I don't actually remember that part. I think most of my childhood memories are dreams, actually. I do remember being in the car with my father, a weird, desperate man, one of many con artists that handled me during my early cognitive development. in the dreams it was always him and my older brother, and the bridge just ended in the middle of sunny blue green expanse, the water of the gulf coast. Sometimes he stopped the car in time, sometimes he didn't. Maybe that's why roller coaster have always inspired deep fear in me. what do you orient yourself around, anchor yourself to?

Last night, I am not sure who was driving the vehicle we were in, there was a handful of other bodies though. the bridge we were on looked more like the Brooklyn bridge, sturdy with high points that remind me of photos of Notre Dame, the cathedral, weathered by the elements, still standing as a testament to the power of faith. It was raining, I think, there must have been some reason for the obvious storm surge that had brought the water level to the edges of the tall bridge - maybe it was the video I watched of a large glacier breaking apart before I went to bed. We were unaware of the intensity of the surge, though I can't help but feel like it was an evacuation, like the ones I grew up with in Florida, from the hurricanes that batter the shore constantly. The rolling waves were suddenly towering stories higher than us, with a quiet, awesome malevolence. There was no choice but to keep driving and watch in horror as the walls of water crashed around us, all we could do was hope with a desperate fear that the rhythm of the waves would just miss us in our trajectory.

The last thing I remember before waking up was feeling the pull, to my high right, and the shape of the monster wave forming itself, and the deep internal stillness being held in my body, inside the vehicle, as I accepted the inevitable, as the driver stepped on the gas.

when I woke up, I was 29 years old.

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Part 1. Kinship

  

 

Post class reflection on Deconstruction themes in Literature, Art, Philosophy, Mythology, Pop culture etc:

 

When providing us with a lens through which to view something, whether you define what that is or not, there is an agenda - because there is something made uniquely available in the process of looking with specificity. A vantage point that makes clear in the contrasts what binds the things being looked at together, what kinship exists between subjects and their objects, and the threads that hold it all together: ideas. Ideas and how they are transubstantiated into matter and become the cultural fabric we build the structures of self with. Ideas, sturdy as institutions. Mythological characters that only lived on the lips of a blind man in ancient Greece became some of the core structures of Freudian analysis. This particularly human trait of finding narrative threads to lead us and to inspire us creates so much the contexts we live inside of, but it is hard to feel and listen for the insubstantial when faced with the substantial - how much easier it is to feel something under our fingertips than it is to feel the edge of a new way of seeing the world.

Which came first - the Wall as metaphor, or the Wall as physical? Is a boundary a thing or an idea? Is there even value in drawing distinctions between the two, if it becomes a vessel for cultural expression, potentially a vehicle for communicating shifting ideas of Self and Other in concretely physical ways?

Institutions are susceptible to ossification when resistant to the changing tides of human need and curiosity, and it is the connective tissue in our body that shows us what we do over and over again, as it molds itself around our habitual movement patterns. At some point the walls we build around our ideas of Self will hinder our ability to respond to new things, and massive upheavals, like devastating weather patterns and falling in/out of love may shake that sense of Self so deeply it feels like we no longer have a sense of who we are.

This is maybe the greatest gift Art, Literature, Philosophy, Mythology and Pop Culture have to offer us - ways to process our past, to define and redefine our narrative according human needs inside of their context. To fully embody our multiple facets and know ourselves inside of them still - like our current myth/theory of the wave particle duality, we exist materially here, in this moment, but what do we orient ourselves around as we are constantly pulled forward by the Current into a place we have never been ourselves before, the Now. Does it help us to bother distinguishing between current/Current and now/Now? How do you know yourself betwixt the two?

What is the difference between Sacred and Rigid? Between Artifact and Idea? Self and Other? Creation and Destruction? Whomever's responsibility it is to draw the boundaries, define the maps, to build the semiotic/literal walls around the stories we tell  - requires a reflection in the mirror, a shadow self that exists in the in-betweens and constantly asks us to reassess who we truly are.

Perhaps this is the role of Artist, Philosopher, Architect, Writer, Priest, Performer - to embody the questions that can be so scary to ask, to craft with language things impossible to name, to live in the world of ideas and to transform word into deed, idea into matter, knowledge into power, communion into flesh.

every tool has a genealogy

 

 

 

Post class reflection on the History/Process of Deconstruction and where it might be headed:

 

It strikes me as hugely important, the ways in which buildings were brought down much earlier in the growth and development of modern civilization - the idea that people paid for the opportunity to be involved, because almost every aspect was salvaged and sold immediately, that the building's components were considered valuable even if the building itself was no longer meant-to-be. How breathing a new building into being involved exhaling an old building and that something could coalesce and disperse without degrading some other aspect of the life cycle of the urban landscape.

But what really changed?

Human Labor began to require expenses previously uninvolved in the process? Or was it the development of technology and new kinds of building materials? What was driving the American frontier that made creating mechanized muscle so profitable? As the scale of cities and human potentiality also expand, how easy does it become to un-see the cellular matrix, to consider the brick and the human vessel for mechanical force as necessary but essentially un-special units of any structure.

There was a time in our past where history was considered valuable, in people and in things, institutions and ideas. I have no idea where the shift was - that made virginity the ideal - that an all consuming drive for the newest thing means that once put into circulation, everything we come in contact with is depreciating in value to society. In our attempt to avoid the necessity of entropy, we facilitate the speed in which it takes hold. It is like we are choosing to define the world not as a system fluctuating around us, but as a system slowly dying.

This idea of modular construction that allows complete break down and reuse of entire structures may be something that gets looked back on with disdain, like the boxes scattered over the landscape from the modernist movement - sometimes it is important to see the brush strokes in the painting, since it gives clues about the artist's thinking, the specific problem they might have been working out in the paint, about shadows and reflected light, about what color laughter in the eyes might be. If we looked at every piece of the mundane process of constructing things, buildings or human beings as if every moment and particle were somehow divinely inspired, how might that affect what they grow up to become? If we could feel respect for each brick and the job it will do, would that respect extend itself to the individual placing that brick into the skin of its building? Are they common laborers or Priests shaping Matter, carving our history onto the earth?

But what of the Architect? Where does he live in this painting? What is the nature of the piece of music he is conducting?

I think it depends on the nature of the building. If longevity is involved in the thought process, than the utility of a building will have to shift along with time, or get swept away by the future. How would we interact differently with space if it was designed to ride the waves of human need and expression? Does it mean that the essential creator of that design is lost in the fluctuations? Are you any less an artist if what you have made is rich earth for people to grow in, rather than monuments to god, ourselves and posterity? And by offering the option to co-create space, how does that fold in the inhabitants - how they might claim a space, relate to or identify with it, and how they might also consider the people that helped craft it?

How can construction/deconstruction be an invitation, rather than an attack?