Work Lines IV

"In Woman is incarnated in positive form the lack that the existant carries in his heart, and it is in seeking to be made whole through her that man hopes to attain self-realisation."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p173

The White Ribbon

It takes a positive act to enable a gesture. In depression, contraction, the plane of extension, gesture, unfurling, action becomes inhibited.
All writing about depression is a paradox, or at least can only happen after the mood has passed, for no positive gesture is possible in the spirit of withdrawal.
What does one do with doubt? The paralysis engendered by lack of faith must eventually be overcome, for the world does indeed keep up its turning.

To find a way forward when confronted by the doubt of no-faith, we either create new faith or remove ourselves from the dilemma. Taking a step back, ironically isolating doubt as a phenomenon in its own right, bracketed off as a thing to be observed. To this end, doubt is masked from its own cause and takes the form of a generative state. We forget the reality that gives us doubt.

Dance.

Dogtooth

Rudolph Arnheim, The Creative Eye
Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking

It is the story of struggle rather than achievement, as allegory of process rather than synthesis. Translated into local codes of application.
~ Francis Alÿs, A Story of Deception, 2010

ego as structural edifice, dissolve
something given and the tense
structure gives way - no ego
Parochiality
Only seeing a narrow parameter

Tremendous relief in letting go.

Mary Martin - Abstraction vs. construction.

Last Night of my Twenties.

On my walk home this evening, the last walk home after work of my Twenties. It means nothing really but I do want to mark it. Something is being said goodbye to, all the events that live in times now passed, all the people and places that are now gone. There's something about turning Thirty that offers the possibility of starting anew. Illusion maybe, but both nice and scary too.



This is the Thames again and I wish I could say it was this colour but actually it was very brown. It's the camera that's made it nice colours.

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.

Bliss

I'm in the most glorious mood, not the most conjusive state for intellectualising.
Bliss!

Sketchy thinking, ideas, analysis on dating sites.

When we join a dating site we write something about 'who we are' and 'what we are looking for'. Sometimes we write this first, when we join, before looking at other people's writing. Sometimes we write ours after. A lot of the time we start with 'I don't know what to write here' or 'this is weird for me'. Either way there is a process that takes place upon our engaging with the dating community:

Presumably we approach the site with sincerity and hope. The hope may well take the form in our minds of a roughly sketched partner of perfection.
When we read other people's profiles we assess our own in relation to theirs, seeing what other people write as the blueprint. We shop around for ideas and we see that other people are more savvy about the internet dating process.
We re-write or edit our writings to communicate with an impression we gathered from reading other people's profiles, our assessment was a social one.
Hence all the profiles that say the same thing.
When we don't partake in this process our profile fails to involve itself with the language of internet dating and subsequently it is unreadable or fails to offer meaning (within the framework of internet dating).
As a result it would appear from Guardian Soulmates that all people are the same: like: travel, walking by the canal, etc.

Personality traits are 'memes'? of personality that we adopt or not. GS is a chance to showcase the particular memes we subscribe to.
Successful profiles are the ones that seem to lead the way in social currents
Confidence pitted against non-confidence being the flipside/darkside of the same thing - celebration comes in validation of someone's alterity or sophisticated antithetical nature
When we read a profile we don't look for the facts but more the ability of the writer to communicate, looking for a similar skill at this form of communication to ourselves. We use identification for this...

Another subjectivity machine, composer, program, curator...


Blah blah......

Once upon a time we kept spelling mistakes safely locked away from the public domain. We fought a war against the tirrany of mistakenism and permitted only the very young, the mad and the poor to commit this crime of sloppiness. We enforced our rulings and the proper way to spell in special books called dictionaries, absurd repositories for words that made them seem as solid and unbendable as our own view dictated.

Now the bars have been lifted and the beast let out; spelling mistakes to be found in every nook and cranny of our world wide web. No longer can we rigidly enforce how our language behaves.

But don't you think that this is representative of a new freedom, one that promises more creativity in language? And is it not also more honest to express yourself in writing without worrying whether you are getting it right?

What? A proliferation of virally degenerate incomprehensions is the face of a new freedom? Disintigration of meaning the new creativity? I suppose you're going to tell me now that spelling mistakes are somehow more honest, that when you hit the send button on your messages that you have not been bothered to spellcheck, you congratulate yourself for being more sincere than most. Sincerity? on this hyperactive mirror show that is the Internet? Hrumph!


More ideas:
spelling mistakes as blind spots
spelling mistakes a trace of endearing 'failures' i.e. cute
spelling mistakes as highly individualised data for Google mashuping and producing data maps like computer programs or knitting patterns of ourselves. Can be read by robots.

Ghost in the machine:
dyslexics still floating around as the 'chosen' ones - artists/outsiders with special access to pictures.

This is the produce of a fun evening with E, doing our first collaborative translation. Written by M, we helped out, E finding the Greek words and me rearranging them into English thinking. Got me very interested in the worldview carried by the structure of our languages. Ashamed that us Angles are so stingy with our language learning, otherwise perhaps my interest in different, localised? world views through language might be more profound. Suspect many multi-language speakers know this already.

I also wanted to make a note on centre of gravity. I am beginning to wonder if subjectivity is the condensed centre of all the debris of our lives, yes, modelled on the black hole theory. And perhaps, now that we have the internet to show us how constructed we really are, that condensed centre is found outside of our bodies, in cyberspace, in the realm of the unreal. My centre of gravity is here.

Also, on language, been listening to art lectures online, art lectures on line, stumped by the accent differences, thickness of accent, slowing of the words, thickening in the mouth, slowing of grasp, different kind of meaning, more time to make it, to let it stew, words make different associations in other accents.

Sabotage:
condensed milk

A little Day of the Triffids moment for us. Plants spectating, speculating, prospecting, over the balcony, escaping?

At lunch with C today was laughing at the Jesus Christ Lord and Saviour People label she gave some elements of her home community. I love the specificity of this. She went on to explain the difference between the Lutherans and Evangelicals and so on. I was thinking about classification, the need to classify, the way we get more and more specialised the more localised? our specialisms become. The line of definition slides between priority, exactitude, accuracy and fixity, identity, enclosure.

Everything I see at the moment seems to be a visual parable of some great natural wisdom. Even the stuff on YouTube. I have been popping in recently for a cry and a laugh.

Really excited this morning. Found a video of a talk by Margaret Wertheim on TED about a project to crochet coral reefs - an environmentalist, artistic and scientific collaboration. Apparently crochet is perfect for representing hyperbolic space. Wicked!



Without dwelling too long on what intuition is, I have been thinking about why we respond to certain ideas so well, perhaps picking up on them previously in other guises. Is this mimesis again? Communication through metaphor, understood abstractly (in language?) on an intuitive level, empathised with through emotions in real-life human interaction, reproduced in creativity as new ideas, plastic or virtual... blah blah, I'm just buzzing like I did reading William Gibson as a teenager. Uranus again. Communication, it's overwhelming. These fishes know where they're going.

Can't sleep on this Orthodox Easter Saturday night. I am thinking that it's a bad thing to post four times on here in my first 24 hours. Then I was thinking who sets the rules?



I've been reading a lot about astrology lately. I am generally quite sceptical but I am drawn to a possible kind of similarity between it and structuralism, through reading Liz Greene's psychological-astrological work. She talks about astrology as our relationship to mythology, symbols, signs, which ties very nicely into an interest of mine in biosemiotics. With this Uranus-Saturn opposition going on, I find myself swinging between imaginative journeys of space, expanding into the nothingness and world of ideas, getting carried away by revolutionary ideas and newness with Uranus, then Saturn reminds me of the need to put a stake in the ground and claim something real to hold on to; Saturn and the necessity of limitations. I think he operates through fear (I have Cancer ascendant and moon in 12th house, plus Saturn almost conjunct my sun, and natal Saturn square Neptune). I have yet to see if my interest in astrology survives the transition.

I like this image because the flower is turning away from us and the glimpse of furry centre is slightly candid camera. Every time I pass these yellow poppies I want to photograph them. They have the most incredible silk-like petals, delicate and sensual. And the colour! I think it might be my new favourite.

Took this today on my walk up to J's to feed the cats and water the plants. Currently fascinated by construction - concrete, steel, order, solidity and magnitude. Think I'm responding to it metaphorically, as well as antidote to the picturesque beauty of Crete. Don't think the image really conveys the awe that big constructed things can make us feel in real life, but happy to discover a kind of twisted elegance in the two arms' coupling.

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