It’s been a month, to say the least. I describe it to people when they ask how I’m doing that I feel like a Gogurt wrapper – those stupid kid-marketed yogurt things – where all the yogurt has been wrung out and all that’s left is this crumpled plastic shell – that’s an apt representation.
I’ve been trying to work this out, via poems. And art. The art has been simply bad. I’m not going to show anyone, they will most likely burn in purifying fire. Little paintings, collages with text, that I’ll spend a Sunday afternoon tediously working on, step back from it, and see a tight, sanitized, BORING object.
So a couple of days ago I was journaling, and a doodle appeared in the margin of the page – like any doodle I’ve done since childhood – just a line, moving around, turning back on itself and making shapes. Not thinking about it, just moving the point through space. And I thought YEAH LETS DO MORE.
Working off a roll of paper, I cranked out these drawings – no color, acrylic, graphite, charcoal – just letting the lines move. Not drawing with my wrist but my arm. My whole body. Not thinking, just moving. They feel energetic – they are energetic. Fast and freer, but still contained.
If you’ve seen the JJ Abrams Start Trek movie, there’s this lazy magic device that ties the script together called dark matter (which also exists in Futurama and other sci-fi things). Dark matter is this mysterious and powerful energy source that only exists as a teeny small quantity, is contained in some crazy magnetic field plexiglass thing. If used sparingly you can do cool sci-fi shit like time travel and instantaneously transport across the universe. Used carelessly, it blows up the universe.
These are the energies within me – within all of us – like volatile dark matter in a stopped vial, bouncing around within its containment. Walking a city is like this – you think you are free to move around but always boundaried by streets and buildings and cars. The ‘psychogeography’ that the Situationists played with. The Inner Self is like this too – you think you know yourself but the stories you learned in childhood, the obligations and duties of being in the world, the ways we conform to roles and identities. We truly do not know ourselves. I do not know myself! What is dormant becomes alive again, creativity invites destruction, aliveness brings volatility. It’s probably better to keep sleeping.
