symbiosis

cotton paintings by Jayson Musson

as you may have heard me say before, I like to see humanity as a vast sea. i think it's because i spend a lot of time just sitting and watching lake michigan, wondering what it can teach me. what i've found is that, metaphorically speaking, each person is a wave, helpless to the pushes and pulls of the water around them. and, in the sea, nothing stays still for long.

when waves merge with other waves again and again they produce a current much larger, more dynamic than any wave could on its own. on lake michigan it's just the beginning, an extraordinary swell; in the ocean, it's a  tsunami.

according to this model, all great societal change must occur by merging collectives of people with other collectives, waves with other waves, until the giant crest reaches its breaking point. in other words, groups need to be working alongside other groups in order to build a network of symbiotic relationships. it is only in this symbiosis, this boundary-crossing harmony, that we can create a successful social tsunami.

collectives with collectives, until the entire sea is stirring

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein

“I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved into the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!”

~Long Days Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill 1953

Jon Braley

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present

~James Joyce

Kenji Hirata

“My dear friend,

I have fallen in love,

This time very seriously.
With him I find a candor, a loyalty,
A tenderness which intoxicates me,
Something I believe I would never encounter anywhere.
I denied this affection, I pushed it away,
And then I surrendered.
I surrendered first to friendship and then to love,
The love I did not understand for so long revealed itself to me.
For now, I am in the condition of regeneration.
This is a reunion of two beings that both revel and delight
In that which they searched for and found,
One in the other.
Each day I attach myself more to him,
Each day I see disappear the little things in him
Which make me suffer,
Each day I see shine and radiate all the beautiful
Things in him that I admire.
Above all, he is a good child—his love is sweet.
After all, there is nothing but good on this earth.”

Letters from George Sand, 1833-35

have a nice day :)
~katy

that is thus

 

an unattainable reality

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I recently wrote a paper in which I had to outline how two different plays (the ghost sonata and the wild duck, 19th ce.) present the theme of honesty. I patiently untangled the circular “drama” of the plays’ characters only to arrive at the idea that “honesty is an ideal imagined into being by human subjects that is thus an individual concept and an unattainable social reality.”

 

 

to tell someone the whole truth, to be completely honest with someone… where would you begin? how far back do you go? how much do you tell?

you would never get through it, even if you started now, even if you wanted to. when you think about it, the truth has neither a beginning nor an end. it stretches back infinitely into the past and lays groundwork for the future. it has no origin. 

 

 

whereas certain people are aware of and bring out certain truths about you (your mother, for example, knew who you were before you had words to express it, and reminds you of it all the time), others are only there for snapshots of your life- flashing events, strange comments, flirting eyes- which build a picture of you, a unique picture of you. thus each relationship is shaped by what truths are shared and what truths remain hidden, intentionally or not. it is not to say we’re all blatant liars, but to suggest that reality is unreal, that all we can do is have faith in each other.

 

 

it is also to suggest that stabilizing truths about yourself and others is an act of creation and our only opportunity to mean anything at all.

 

 

 

“I saw a Colonel who was not a Colonel, I found a noble benefactor who turned out to be a crook, I saw a mummy that was not a mummy, and a maid… Where is virginity to be found? Or beauty? Only in the flowers and trees…and in my head when I am dressed in my Sunday clothes. Where are faith and honour to be found? In fairy tales and games that children play. Where can I find anything that will fulfill its promise? Only in my imagination.”

August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata

 

 

 

 

 

 

where would you begin??

 

 

today’s featured fairy tale illustrators: warwick goble and virginia sterrett

*the theme of honesty also inspires my previous post, “an attempt to ‘fix this continuous flux’”*

an attempt to “fix this continuous flux”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Life is a continuous flux and we seek to arrest it…

 

 

 

 

 

 

The forms in ourselves by which we seek to arrest and fix this continuous flux are the concepts and ideals which we would like to keep consistent, all the pretenses we create, the conditions, the state in which we endeavor to stabilize ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But inside ourselves, in what we call the soul, which is the center of our lives, the flux continues, indistinct, sliding under the barriers we have set up, beyond the limits we have imposed,

 

 

 

 

fashioning a consciousness and constructing a personality for us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At certain violent moments, assailed by the flux, all our make-believe forms crumble miserably;

 

 

 

 

and even what does not slither under the barriers and beyond the limits, even what is clearly a part of us…overflows in certain moments of fullness

 

 

 

 

and throws everything into confusion.”

Excerpt from L’Umorismo (Humour) by Luigi Pirandello, 1908

 

 

 

in other words,

 

"Cogito ergo nescio certe."
I think, therefore I don't know for sure.

 

“This world is more of a mental than a physical one” –Prof. Carney

 

 

featured artists: ray caesar, kim asendorf, mathew borrett and sculptures by benjamin shine

Letter to my 30 year old self

as 2013 comes to a close, we are all thinking about the betterment of ourselves in the future. for some, this comes in the form of new year’s resolutions. as for me, I’ve decided to archive a letter to my 30 year old self that I wrote mid-exams (11/26) in my last year in university, in hopes for a more long-term resolution to take hold. enjoy-


Dear 30 Year Old Self,

Yes, this is your past self addressing you. While 8 years ago you were overwhelmed by a congestion of assignments, wondering if you’d ever finish your papers alive, I hope by now you’ve found a way to put your education to good use. Lol. Before we go any further, I just wanna ask- were all the hours spent over the articulation of new media convergence, relational aesthetics (Tomas Saraceno- where is he now? Did he ever get around to producing that social change his work promised?), and the semiotics of comic books worth it? I wonder how much different your life and your concerns are now. I hope you haven’t forgotten your guiding light, your belief that all worries are fleeting.

I assume you’ve encountered a few serious events along the road, maybe career or romance failures, or even deaths of people who are closest to us. However, the purpose of this letter is that I really don’t want you to lose track of me, your younger self. As I already feel my youth slipping away, unable to feel that ridiculously, dangerously carefree attitude I once possessed in high school (while that is not necessarily something I want to go back to), it becomes pressing to me to preserve what left of it I have.

First and foremost, never be too hard on yourself. Remember that life is a joke, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean anything.

Second, I want to remind you that you wanted to make change, not money. If you’ve given into the system by now, this letter might be pointless, because I’d no longer be addressing myself but an entirely different person. Are you pirating society, breaking it down so that you can build it up "as you would”? You spoke of such ideas drunk in the sand one night, but I can confidently say they resonate deep within you.

Third, I hope your heart hasn’t been irredeemably split in two by a man you put too much trust in, but if it has, remember that you are a pioneer, you always have been, and you always can, without question, make it on your own.


All the best,


Your 22 Year Old Self

“According to psychologists, resilience, not happiness, is the opposite of depression.”

Related article: Women’s Midlife Crisis now at 30

film and the engineering of emotions

while tv and movies have only existed for the last century, I find myself constantly having to explain why I don’t watch them, as if it were some sort of sin, or as if it goes against human nature. I’ve written plenty of film studies papers. I’ve actively contemplated the ways in which they help us understand ourselves. but why does our culture worship these media forms? my best friend asked me to write about my dislike, because it’s apparently unprecedented in the millennial generation- no one gets it.

to be concise,

what I don’t like about watching tv or sitting in front of a movie is that it is passive. it is engineered not necessarily to make you think in a certain way, but to make you feel a certain way. as a person who thrives on being in control of my own emotions, I don’t necessarily enjoy being absorbed by a character’s problems and feelings, especially if they’re not good feelings. i don’t sense the productivity in doing so, in dealing with frivolous sadness or despair or worry- frivolous, because, these dealings reach beyond my immediate control.

the personal dimension to my disposition is centered on the fact that I can't tolerate my own negative emotions…and a movie immerses me in things I try not to think about, reminds me of emotions and events and relationships I long to forget. it projects my feelings before me, even tries to organize them for me, and makes me sit through the entire duration. while others might find it an escape, I find it the opposite. an introspective trap.

produced via editing and omitting, film by nature attempts to organize, to contain, encounters and life events that are inherently and overwhelmingly abstract. it cuts events that often take a lifetime to unfold into segments that confer upon the event a particular, one-dimensional or linear reading when no such thing exists, to the extent that viewers fit themselves into manmade categories and conventions in order to connect with what they see on screen. it takes me out of the position of creator and dictates the way I see my own life; it prescribes my social and personal experience. I find that a bit scary.

in the end, why would I want to be troubled with a drama so lifelike, yet artificial, when there are plenty of conundrums of consequence and meaning to be sorted out right around us? with film, we have degraded the value and excitement and unpredictability of the world itself…

art, on the other hand… art evokes the imagination, it is only what you make it. it is more hospitable to my own, deeply ingrained defense mechanism, that is, to create the world I walk in, without which I wouldn’t be as positive or as successful as I am today. unlike film, art allows me to move on, instead of lingering in a dimension in which I do not have the power to make change.

you probably don’t agree, but I’m cool with that. I’m used to it by now.

Fragonard, The Swing, 1766

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
~George Bernard Shaw

related article: http://www.mtlblog.com/2014/01/this-is-your-brain-on-netflix/

today’s featured artist: antonio mora