Universal Perspective. Huh.

Thank you Tom and MN Planetarium Society, for letting me crash your program in pursuit of:

He's Not A Ladies Man, He's A Landmine

Refusal Aesthetics.
This is the current manifestation of previous work on refusal, denial, saying no.
What's the value? What is all this for?
Half my practice is in service of exploring potential and possibility: infinite spaces and enormous patterns. This practice comes from my beliefs in the potentials of life, in the potential and possibility of all people and things, in infinity, randomness and chance. I really nurture this belief in most of the things I do, its the larger practice and belief system of my life. I want to work in service of Yes.
That being said, there's another half of my work that wants to court the opposite, and dwell on the consideration that maybe there's no potential to be found, that possibility is rare, that nothing is possible.
Negative, right?
I was thinking, a couple of years ago, about how one of the worst things you can expect, or hear from another person is the word No.
Rejection, refusal, impossibility.
Saying no is a powerful thing. It's a declaration of your boundaries. It can protect you.
Saying no, accepting never, these are powerful stances in an age of Yes. An age of complacent and unthoughtful Yes, but an age of Yes nonetheless.
Part of the pleasure in this process is in defiance of the materials. Craft materials and techniques in service of No seems rather subversive and precise in a way that all the crummy affirmatives and prettifying Martha Stewart add-ons can't be.

There's an almost wicked pleasure, on one hand, to saying No, to beginning from a stance of refusal that I adore.
There's also the struggle that the process of these pieces helps me to work through, the struggle to accept things that can or will never be. Acceptance of being told No, ownership of the possibility that some things might not be possible.
Sometimes the answer is No.
Sometimes it's Never.

Double Life

Another Drunk Conquistador

The postscript to "Imagine Everything You See As Drawn" and "Symmetry" is actually drawings. Surprise, sometimes, will come around.

I'm a Specialist in Hope

Help me find symmetry

Reimagine everything you see as drawn.

New Escape Routes for Hesitant Lovers

New work. (0.0N, 0.0S)
20x24 Ink/Watercolor/Acetate

Rapid Eye Movement

Yesterday I dreamed I had a photo of a landscape: mostly sky, and a low distant mountain. And the photo wasn't a still image, it was always changing, particularly the sky. There were people with me, and they asked me to get the sky to rain, as if I had that ability, and were talking about the sky as a woman.
"Make her cry for us, we need rain."
And at the moment the photograph was portraying a dark, heavy cloud over the mountain that sort of swirled menacingly. The horizon was pink, the sky looked like it does just before a tornado reaches out of the clouds.
So I sat by a window, looking over the same landscape as depicted in the photograph, and the sky was a tamer version in reality than the storm brewing in the picture.
Using an eye dropper full of water and ink, I dripped water into the clouds in the photograph, and the real sky grew rapidly darker. The horizon turned pink, the clouds became thick and dark and swirling.
The people that had asked for the rain watched this happen with me, and they were laughing and joking about how I could make her cry, what a funny thing to be able to do.
And I was thinking, too, how easy this was, to make her cry.
But then I wasn't looking out the window at the new storm emerging, but was now looking at a woman who vaguely resembled me, collapsing in tears against a tabletop, crying into her arms. She wasn't in the same time and space as us, she was in some dim room, a long ways away. It was as if I was seeing her on television. Her voice was distant and choked, and I didn't realize at first her sounds were addressing me, when she asked me to please stop what I was doing.
The other people were no longer there.
And I felt the overwhelming knowledge that what I did was horribly wrong.

"And then I woke up."

Crazily beautiful dream that's been on my mind all day, especially since we did get two nice storms today.

Summer Wolves

New work! 3x4 feet each.

Stealing from nature (stealing from Bjork, too)

Recent digital endeavors.

Things needed:

I need one of these. I keep feeling like I'm going to just fly apart unless something holds me down.

Absolutism

What is the function of taking seemingly absolutist stances? Can anyone actually make their mind and heart hard as a diamond?
I'm thinking a lot about absolutes. I'm thinking.
Recent accusations suggest that I have been too absolute in my beliefs. Or, rather, lack of beliefs. Can you be absolute in lacking? Was it Deleuze that wrote on "lacking"?
What a strange word.

So here it is: if I consider my position on the big issues- love, faith (another type of love), potential, possibility, futurity... I can confess a lack of belief. It's not something I am proud of, I want to believe in these things.
To be clear, my desire to believe translates into total respect and admiration for people who do believe. Truly. To be a believer is seems to be open-hearted, seems to be trusting and with grace.
I offer to my accuser the position that to be a non-believer is not the absolutist stance it seems to be. Maybe this is a point of view I would hold alone.
For me, the lack of belief functions as a porous state of total openness. An acceptance of the ambiguities, a listening ear for the discordancies, inconsistencies, intricacies that make the totality of living so very fascinating.
To choose one way to think or believe, as a method of defining self and the self's relation to the world seems infinitely more absolute to me than my position.

I am totally enthralled with the idea that life is governed by chance, without pattern or over-arching meaning beyond the moment. This is a difficult position to maintain, I'll be the first to admit, as I occasionally fall into apophenia, thinking that surely all things are connected. I hear over and over again that life without pattern or symbolism is life without meaning. I disagree.
I was thinking symbolism and connectivity might be the opposite of paranoia, but the opposite is actually pronoia. Both noia's rely on the observer's self-focused world view. Either the world conspires against you or for you.
But apophenia, I think, lends itself better to the idea that you are witnessing the machinations of the clockwork universe (and it has a plan). Admittedly, I have never felt like I was at the center of some universal plot.

Sometimes I come across research that suggests the mind isn't built to function without a sense of connectivity. That the mind is built to "establish a point of order in what seems like a random system of information." That it is cognitively challenging, or impossible, or ill-advised, to exist in a position of non-differentiation. That is, the mind needs to believe there is some sort of plan.
Today I don't think there's a plan.
Last year (and the year before, and the year before) I was researching magical thinking and romantic delusion, and it's so strange how often I end up right back in it. It's inescapable. Is there an inherent pattern in that? Is something important trying to reveal itself, or am I just retreading, annually, these ideas?

To consider absolutism and a lack of belief in the context of delusion and magical thinking is an even more interesting proposition than trying to prove the value of my personal porousness! Think of how you thought as a child. (Most magical thinking research seems to be focused on early childhood development and schizophrenics.) Think of all the systems you invented to explain how the world was, with the little information you had as a child.

Couldn't sleep without the blankie or the the toy.
Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy.
Making wishes in fountains, with birthday candles, and wishbones.
Imaginary friends, object permanence, fairy tales, curses, jinxes, bogey men.

Your whole perception of cause and effect is skewed by lack of information, and need to make sense of everything around you. That way of thinking doesn't necessarily cease just for aging, there are still systems beyond control that you generate meaning for, for lack of information. Love, faith, and futurity are huge unknowable systems we tangle with every day, with so many variables and unknowables we have to create some concrete worldview to define them and contain them for us, to define our relationship to and function in them.

I am always looking for ways that magical thinking is manifesting around me, and in me. Things that aren't understood, things beyond control. Who isn't always trying to create some system of relevance just to get through the day?

So, to come full circle, how does a lack of belief relate to all this? When I am being very generous with myself, I imagine that a lack of belief is an acceptance of the lack of knowledge, acceptance of my incapability to control things that no one can control. I don't know where or if god lives. I don't know perfect love, probably never have, maybe never will. I don't know what the future will bring, or that it will be good, that things will work out.
When I am being very cruel to myself I think, too, that the lack of belief might be too absolute, and a natural outgrowth of some self-loathing, or self-destructive desire to stop moving forward, or to exist in a state of exception.
But mostly I think it is a desire to not be tied to a world view so concrete. As previously stated, most belief systems seem to me more absolute than a lack of belief.
The porousness of my position is the most absolute position I have.
To restate, however, I have nothing but the utmost respect for believers, only a mild jealousy for the grace and faith they are capable of.

But this isn't some manifesto, it's a clarifying defense.

An Army of Lovers

Who cares about armies of lovers, anyways?

Ancient Greeks encouraged their soldiers to be romantically involved with each other, saying, "An army of lovers can't be beaten." Idea being no one would let their lover fall in battle. (It's been laughingly pointed out that this is a radical departure from "don't ask, don't tell" Clinton-era politics. I would say it reveals a major shift from a culture that believed lovers had some kind of power to one where they clearly don't.)

I don't think I believe an army of lovers can't be beaten, but I could be persuaded.

Back burner: Binary Separateness & Setting Your Heart On Fire.

Page a day, one day late

Exercise on reflection, Lake Hiawatha.

Reminded: Waikiki

Page a day.
Harmonious sketchbook convergence: How to spell "reminded" for a student under a torn page with a photo of Waikiki. And a sad song.

New stalled book

Romantic Delusion in the police state. I'm stuck, though.
Made with pages my dad and I shot with a shotgun.

Recent Project

Advice for...?

Dreaming in Book format

It's time to make new books.
I'm so grateful its a new year, and I'm hoping I can break through the inertia I've been experiencing lately!
This is the first page from my last book.
The text describes a dream I had about being at a Russian airport at dawn, running to try to catch my connection.

I'm still formulating what the future books will even be about.
Maybe I know by the time I finish Mason & Dixon!