Stream-of-con scious ness

[sisyphus]

Which is, I think, pretty immoral if there really is a God.  But I'm caught up in my world too much to let myself go--which is funny since you talked about Hopkin's 'inscape' instead of 'escape' and in my case it's as if my inscape has become my hidey-hole from reality. ITS EASY TO SEPARATE YOURELF FROM THE WORLD AND MAKE YOUR OWN RULES, AND IT SEEMS THE ONLY WAY TO GUAGE YOUR PROGRESS OR IMPROVEMENT, WHEN YOU DON’T COMPARE YOURSELF TO OTHERS, IS BY SUBJECTIVELY INTERPRETING YOUR OWN SINCERITY. YOU KNOW EVERY INSTANCE WHERE YOU MESS UP....YOU’RE SO AWARE OF ALL YOUR FLAWS.. the only way to inscape externally is to make up stories like the following:

Soon we’re both fixated on the idea of applying for an NEA grant and doing a collaborative project together. This makes us horny, so we go “sleep” on it. In the morning, we go out on the deck with some fresh squeezed orange juice and bagels, and begin organizing on paper some of the hodgepodge of ideas that poured out the night before. A jogger dashes by, and to our great surprise and delight a graceful seagull poops on his head, soiling his glitzy Oakleys.

With the advent of this sign, we know it is time to set our plans in motion. Soon, we have received not only a large NEA grant, but funds from various telethons put on by people on the fringes of society who support our cause. We have attracted a small group of 20 or so people, all passionate about our plan to revamp the entire fortune cookie industry in a sweeping revolution of passion. With our money, we build a huge complex/factory, where we bake a variety of naturally flavored and secretly spiced fortune cookies, containing specific life, community. and social change enhancing words of wisdom, and sometimes more.... Some cookies are politically controversial. Some push the edges of art theory. Some demand absurdly exciting behavior from their readers. Some are in foreign languages and must be translated. Some are ink blot tests. Ideas abound. After one year of travel (necessary to the inspiration required for the cookies) and cookie construction, we have our opening reception in SoHo.

The gallery floor is painted with words, symbols, and flooded with crumbling cookies. Everywhere the various patrons, critics, and other artsy-fartsies walk, they fill the grooves of their shoes with cloves and cookie dust. The crunch is enhanced by hidden microphones beneath the floorboards. Thousands of cookies hang on strings throughout the gallery, from which visitors are invited to partake. Tiny photographs of the sea litter the gallery walls in a random fashion, lit from behind. A large aquarium is suspended in the center of the gallery, containing mysterious content yet to be revealed... Jerry Saltz is astounded by the brilliance of the display, and writes a raving review for the village voice, as well as a book entitled “somnambulists of the sea,” celebrating the burgeoning community surrounding our new art movement.

As our fortune cookie art movement expands (infiltrating numerous markets, with a good percentage of the proceeds going to various "charitable" causes), we attract some of the most fascinating and curious minds of our day to our humble fortune cookie factory. Soon it expands to become a commune/utopia for artists, poets, and philosophers, and soggy haze-ified stoners who make no distinction between art, poetry, and philosophy. Stimulating conversation abounds. Books are written. Films are produced. Reality is redefined. Debate is constructive. Happiness abounds. Sex is hot. And the truest, most honest philosophies of the world are woven into a fabulous tapestry of inspiration and continual obsession among the inhabitants of the socially, philosophically, and environmentally conscious inhabitants of our new nation. In other words, I have no fear of even a moment's boredom, yet plenty of time to meditate and daydream because I am lazy. i am seeking to write only to myself, for myself, and about myself, while simultaneously fully acknowledging that other people read what i have written, that i am [to a degree] influenced by their resulting judgements (regardless of my efforts to the contrary), and that the experiences i analyze are obviously inextricably meshed with those of other human beings (and affected accordingly). a foolish conundrum. leaves me toying with the idea of just closing up shop. i'll have a gin and tonic.

i liked that part about the tennis shoe...the left one. signal left.

[rockkid]

and to our great surprise and delight a graceful seagull poops on his head, soiling his glitzy Oakleys.

Call me pure evil if you must but I adore the mental image.




Merci for that.

[sisyphus]

all Oakley sportin' beach truffers must die!

[rockkid]

Oakley = the new Lacoste. ................. Come on you know it's true

[sisyphus]

it is true...but i still love lacoste.... i love all little alligators. i want to be the bird that picks their teeth clean.

[sisyphus]

Marcel duchamps enters the room, and strikes a pose as the unilateral signifier for “everything not present.” He presses his finger textually to the inner corner of his eye, and breathes in negation. Is he pointing to his eye? Or is he pointing his own eye-gaze toward another maze? A maze reflected (or read) outward in his microcosmic haze? Why do we interrupt him(them) in this private space, anyway? And why do YOU fear YOUR intuiton? Because it happens to creep softly on the contextualized or culturally defined “dark side” of this binary opposition to moon? If this is the case then try DECONSTUCTING your post-FACE post-haste, and feed the collective inside your body. “We deny our cells like we deny our selves, ” some(body)? whispered.

stop being freaky said the beetle somewhat cheeky

[sisyphus]

What words say does not last. The words last.
Because words are always the same, and what
they say is never the same.

~Antonio Porchia

I think I have a.d.d. Sometimes when I’m wallowing in some sort of social situation, I can’t manage to participate. I can’t respond beyond a few shrugs and smiles. (Which is not to say that at other times I am not completely present, bantering and wisecracking with the best of them...) I am somewhere else. I am wrapped inside a convoluted vortex of competing ideas swirling around in the ether of my mind, and I’m struggling to condense their multidimensional nature into flat 2-d language. I can’t focus. I can’t figure out which ones are more important and relevant, and which to ignore. I have a difficult time with relativity. I’ve never felt like language is enough, but I’ve always felt like it is the only thing that can really communicate and validate what it is I’m thinking to someone else. But it’s a lie. It is NOT enough. Still, I want desperately to transcend my own identity/ego and commune with other human beings. Don’t we all? Sometimes the hope exhausts me. I become so disillusioned by the attempt that I get mentally constipated. I refuse to blog. I can’t say it all, so I figure why bother saying anything. I want art to become that medium I guess, but really it is almost even further removed if it is based in language, as has been my habit. An even more obscure visual vocabulary based in language? What good does that do? How do I appeal directly to the emotions, the way music can, without using a medium of abstraction? Why can’t I focus? Why can’t I just make art and sell it? Why did I get A’s in school, and yet find myself struggling to make ends meet with a minimum hourly wage? Am I lazy? I definitely need to figure out how to discipline myself. Why can’t I follow a routine? A schedule? Get some anchor to my life? I feel like one of those dry feathery seeds from a dead dandelion. I’m being blown around in the wind, and I can’t control where I land. Since I have no control, I seek control through analyzation of this mysterious wind. And what is this wind? My mind? Am I saying I have no control over my mind? Do I possess my mind, or does it posses me? It’s a frustrating quantum experiment. I can’t get outside myself to observe myself, can I? Or can I? What is my “self?” Yes, I’m cycling through the same tireless dilemmas over and over. Even when I feel that I’m able to get a grasp on them, this grasp is only intellectual, and therefore only superficial. Eternal recurrance. I need a mental laxative. Maybe I need to start writing in a stream-of-consciousness format, without obsessing about control, organization, clarity, et cetera (like I am now). I recently found a new way of approaching visual artwork. I doodle. I begin with no preconceived ideas about what I will draw, and I just let the pen guide me. The weirdest things will happen if I just let go....weird unconscious things. Then, afterward, I exert some control by extracting particularly interesting parts of a doodle-fest and blowing them up on a new clean sheet of paper. For some reason this makes me feel good. I think in visual mechanics. I’m definitely right-brained. I scored in the 99th percentile on the mechanics section of the ASVAB (no worries, I was not manipulated into the military.) I feel like my ideas about life form in a poetic mechanical sort of way, and I’ve always had a difficult time translating them into words. Still, I’ve always felt that words are the only way to validate or communicate those ideas. How do I get past this? I’ve got the reading comprehension thing down, but do I have the the writing propulsion thing down? No. I cannot write. I need to choke on some word steam.

[wayved]

thats the way it goes. water down the drains all the time.
thats the way it goes. airplanes fly car tires place their mark on the road.
sadness darkness all ignored. replaced by some sort of entertainment.
never getting in touch with ones self.
Dreams of big black walls no one can climb.
A decade of antidepressants and a messed up liver.
Bargaining chip for nothing.
Even the nine non-existent geese in your backyard yell nothing at you in their squak.
hard work for money
money for what?
a smile? a chance? to dance freely in an empty street that only exists in your dreams?
a kiss from the only one you love may rescue you but only for a moment. But you realize the bitterness. its all over. Bridges wont save you nor will guns you must travel on silently with a smile.
Flak Jackets bad films bad jokes, hasty decisions. drill bits altered clothes.
its all the same.
the same old rain.
rain of no intelligent compassion.
it will rain down
all the time
cos no one knows
how to stop it

[wayved]

nor do they want to

[sisyphus]

because if they did
they wouldnt experience
the pleasurable sensations
of evaporation.
let us evaporate.

[wayved]

evaporation....

woah!

the dissapation of the rain from brains in pain converted to human rain to human eyes
floats out to clouds that may dissapate too.
Evaporation. But eventually Everyone is getting the tears.

[sisyphus]

....oh the humanity....90% water....this is the end, my friend....the end....we are lakes of skin!!!!

[Thorngrub]

evaporation.
vapor. pores.
ration. evaluate.
you ate value.
vapor ate you.
rate your evil.
or your evil will
rate you.
your devil
will pour.
our will
your devil.
poor willy.
poor devil.

[sisyphus]

She went to her do-nothing job that evening set upon writing several trippy treatises that could go into her book-of-everything-and-nothing-koob. By detailing possible explanations for the various screws turning in the world, and then countering those explanations with the advocacy of the devil (who thrives on her precious bodily fluids as he clutches tightly to her brain stem), she hoped she might find some closure in such an opening. [scan forward to present] Alas, all intentions fail as they’re absorbed into the “now” that, draped over her vibrating eyes, never submits to planning and routine. She loathes its unforeseeable fits of movement and drags of slack. She aches to inhabit (purely at her puppeting control) a more mechanical version of herself. Such a prototype might more efficiently process and complete the various loose ends floating in utero beside the diabolic blood clot choking her brain stem. These loose ends might include her thoughts on ego, and how she vainly struggles to overcome it. Her plans for walls. Her growing love/tenderness for one Shaun Lawton, despite the questionable taste in art and decor he may have, and the threat such differences pose to her ego. Her meditations on ethics, and the personal evolutions they have undergone in their mild and childish ways. Her current theories on the nature of big hairy things like the universe, identity, subjectivity, mean people, and the consumption of earth by plastic stuff. Her desperate exertions toward completing various art projects. Her longings to live in more humid environments. Her conclusions about various books, albums, and films. Her observations and analyses of various friends and relatives. Her love for the avocado. For the most part she really has (and seeks) no direct control of people or events in her life, and so to compensate she uses writing [that is to say: recording] as a means to a wee morsel of power. [She expects to choke on said morsel in 2018] She saw an interesting movie the other night called “The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes” which provoked hundreds of little thought-threads in her tired and hungry head. She wishes she had a copy of the movie which she could play/pause/discuss with someone equally interested in its content. She is lonely and not lonely. Her dreams are vivid, engrossing, and bizarre. She wishes she could record them, or at least render them faithfully post sleepy-time. She is amazed at the things she believes are true during the period between just waking up and fully regaining consciousness. She wishes she could be him for a few days to see what it’s like. She struggles for honesty but muddles along with vague, whispy, get--you-through-the-day sorts of lies. She harbors so many excuses for the world that very little can ever make her truly angry and she fears this is not healthy. She craves focus but the penumbra of the area she occupies will probably always be infinitely thick and starchy.

[Thorngrub]

Several dogs formed a club. Pretty soon other dogs wanted in. After some rigorous profiling, they were allowed inside. Eventually one of these dogs decided the club wasn't good enough. So he formed another club. A secret club. He secretly sent out messages inviting an elite cadre of dogs to belong in this new, secret, sub-club. Turned out these dogs didn't have much fur. Insufficient insulation. Their new subclub served as a new zoot suit. They all wore their zoot suit together, taking turns trying it on. Eventually the zoot suit frayed and fell apart, from being worn by too many dogs. They kept on wearing it anyway.