Found on the Other Side of a 'To Do' List

Horror of groundlessness, of the reset button, of losing yourself in the attempt to uncover that elusive something worth believing in.
The reset button puts us back at the rawness of the experience, it sweeps away the illusions, self-fufilling structures of being that justify their own existance, the structures built to give us something to hold on to. We wipe them away and there is nothing to hide behind and the rawness of our response comes.

Overview

Trying to decide which of my photos might be appreciated as a gift for my two closest friends here in Chania. These are a few of my short list:





















In the end this process has become a bit of an assessment of all the photos I took whilst being away in Greece and Egypt. A natural closure.

Some Quickies...

...I'm on fire!

Sunset this evening:

Observations #2

I'm getting tardy I know, but there are reasons.
Some observations recently in words:

So many birds in cages, birds singing gloriously, nailed to a crumbling wall, above the ancient woman who keeps them there.
Birds in cages outside the petshop. Chorus of competing singing and chirping to the accompaniment of terrifying Greek traffic on a tuesday morning. Birds calling to be noticed in cages.

A lone cockroach outside the supermarket. Retreating from the pavement as we pass. Returns to its position when we are gone.

A basketball court at night with the stars just visible despite the floodlight. Tall metal arms holding the hoops and their shadows falling over the court, one arm's shadow intersecting with an oilstain, interconnected, a centipede makes a quick scuttle across both and into the dark on the other side.

A rusty drain pipe protruding from the middle of a balcony four floors above us. Showering the street with soapy water. At midnight there were rivers of the stuff making inky landscapes all over our walk home.

A fish with a tail of fine silk billowing out behind it, locked in a never ending forward motion in a glass bowl. Glassy eyes that don't register me.

Ach Thoughts.

I am deliberating over how much word I want to put on the blog. For the sake of visitors I tend to think pictures and minimal writing is enough; sometimes though I am in the mood to talk.

I just went off on one with an opinion on someone else's blog:

Jane McCoy's post brushing off the chips

I read myself in your excellent blogpost, not just in the persona but in the analysing it after. I've spent good hours negotiating the 'show myself/hide myself' dichotemy and thought I might share some thoughts with you (if you don't mind).

1) Coolness is always as we perceive. I have on several occasions been informed that it was me who appeared 'cool' at school despite the fact I was a nervous wreck. I am at the conclusion that everyone feels sensitive in the end, it just varies how we display it.

2) I come to the belief that there is something inherent to art-production that is about uncovering/covering or hiding/showing. It lead me to Heidegger.. blah blah and too much intellectualising later, I feel that the process of making art is experienced within us bodily as we bodily become extensions of the object we wish to manifest (or something..). Anyway, what I'm (taking too long) saying is that the negativity we experience is a crucial part of the dialectic and life and art-making - the boundaries, the retraction, assessment, etc. etc. Our abilities to be self-critical are not just psychologically the 'tortured artist' stereotype but just a necessary part of bringing something into the world. Being sensitive to it is because making art fine tunes our listening abilities precisely for this making process (and responding to the world around). If we had no doubt then we would be running ourselves and our art riot all over the world - a violent and monolithic way of making a mark. Ok, maybe I will make this into my own blog post... not sure... sorry to impose.... Keep up the good work, I like your drawings.

I have decided to re-post it here because it collates some of my thinking on this subject of disclosure, uncovering, truth, the ground of truth.. and the role of doubt in this process. Having suffered from doubt in various forms of discomfort/self abasement, it comes to me as something in the end that must be necessary. There is nothing more grounding than the continual return to making, producing, thinking, writing - even if this production is just the debris or excess of a kind of striving, aspiration.

Was writing a little recently on the violence of totality and the drive towards totalisation. I come to this from reading some discussions on the nature of knowledge (being a drive towards co-opting every 'thing' out there into the system of knowledge), and I live this through the disappointment of hearing sentences that I have somehow heard before, and before, and before... I'm not asking for pure originality (what's that?!) but instead am just recognising how homogeneous we insist on being in the name of our insertion into the world. I make a case for subtlety, listening, small things, sensitivities, taking the time to respond honestly, a commitment to letting ourselves respond.

(This last paragraph is woefully without references and steps rudely onto Derrida's toes. I will return to it as I think Derrida is right and that there is nothing really grounding beneath it all. But this is another post.... ach! thoughts!)

And More Pigeons

Yes I may be pushing up against the line between absurdity and boredom, but I am still very much in love with pigeons. It could be a little harmless anthropomorphism, it could be an attraction to their purely instinctual being. They seem to embody 'flow'. In groups their spacial awareness causes them to make evenly balanced patterns best seen from above.

And finding the odd squashed one on the road still affects me.

Thought Themes To Build On (1)

Current topics of interest:

crystalise - a moment in time, of time, a realising, the birth of a structure
revelation as disclosure, uncovering
phenomenological description vs writerly imagination
mothering, mothership, as a state and concept
facing the world with our viewfinders already configured to see according to the structures we already know
destroying structures, destroying worldviews, in order to see reality again

the experience of being absolutely structureless and out in the world
despair

rebuilding

Hermeneutics

4th June 2009

Souvlaki yoghurt round our lips, cold flat chips left neglected, perhaps my writing is nothing more than an excersize in self-deception. Effect, building a life, beer to drink.

Aesthetics coupling, making solid in time, construction,
belief beasts interest,
abstract drawing
order.

Sense Uranus op. Saturn,
virtual awe axiom,
beginning, brain conflict
flowers intuition, love make.

Contradiction, hairline crack mimesis,
shattered, spring,
Chania Crete, Saturn Return,
angel elegance happy.

Line incoherent,
pigeon twisted,
affetti feet grief.

Mezzanine the slack,
virgo.
Άνοιξη Neptune difference,
electro.

Hello again.

I have enlisted the help of a service called FeedBurner to provide a subscription service for the blog. As part of this service it provides me with stats on how many subscribers I have and some information about where they are coming from (only browser info, I don't get to know who they are).

It says: "FeedBurner Stats provides publishers with a single interface for analyzing the content consumption habits of their audience — be it feed subscribers or website/blog visitors. This insight can help you determine which content is performing best, where your audience is located, and better understand detailed information about traffic sources such as search engines." (1)

I also tried to make an account with Technorati which is a blog community site and quite interesting because it reads labels to tell us what are the hot topics at any one time in the blogosphere. Bit like the way Twitter is a window into the (mostly US) world. But Technocrati doesn't like something about me and refuses to take my blog, and I found in the small print that once you are accepted into their community they still might chuck your blog out.

They say: "Do not tag exessively. Make sure the tags you use to describe your posts really do describe your posts. If we see high occurrences of unrelated, variants and synonyms, or over-use of tags in your posts, we may conclude that your site is trying to game the system." (2)

Guess that's me then.

I am thinking about the rules that govern, the market-consumer model for people, performance/audience metaphors, organising criteria always being political, the community/exiled binary, blog-as-me-me-as-blog, where does experimentation belong?, politics of visibility (which as a term is usually associated with identity politics - sexuality, race, and so on)... The internet can only reflect our own organising structures.

A beautiful capitalist critique for you.

I wonder how many times I will go back to FeedBurner today to see if anyone else has subscribed...

Wow, aesthetics and coupling, kings of the castle.

Welcome to PPI :)

Hello, welcome. This blog is to try and make something of what goes on in my head and record it. I have a history of writing about myself, diaries and blogs, but am feeling resistant at the moment to sharing. We shall see then what happens between some conflicting interests. I hold that we are vessels for what goes on outside of ourselves and that we mirror, mimic, the world at large. This enables me to write, as the oscillation between inside and out is where we live and how we make sense.

On making sense I am not particularly interested in being coherent. It's been a tough winter and I am shattered; this is a beginning and an axiom. I suspect what starts off very raw and messy here will be edited into something more solid in time, but for now, pictures are easier as expressions and I'm wondering if keywords, labels and tags are the new criticism.

Luna