Every year I begin by mourning all of the thoughts that I have lost. I mean this to be temporary and conclusive, but it never is; the rest of the year is a continuation. No new idea can replace the one that is already gone.
Every year I begin by mourning all of the thoughts that I have lost. I mean this to be temporary and conclusive, but it never is; the rest of the year is a continuation. No new idea can replace the one that is already gone.
I choose to start from a point of optimism in art, that to make “art” is good. It better to make than not to make. The second question becomes, then, is it better to display (to disperse) art than it is to hold it close? Is personal art inherently archival?
Today I rather accidentally referred to design as a “performative art,” due to the stress that is incurred from creating things that exist solely in public. You do not design things for private use, or at least for your private use. I suppose that it is possible to design for yourself (only), but it is rare.
Since graphic design is a symbolic exercise, that also makes it a symbiotic exercise. It is a uniquely two-sided design discipline, in that “reaction” is an inherent qualifier for success. Reaction (in this case) is the subjective response by a viewer either towards or against a specific message. Whereas product design or architecture or fashion design or anything in that realm have the benefit of tactile satisfaction, or testability in the sense that you can find out if “this thing works” by allowing users to interact with it directly, graphic design deals with the intangible and emotional only.
The way graphic design “works “ is by provoking a change of perception. An altered thought.
This, perhaps, is too simple, but I will say it all the same: complicated things are better than simple things, or at least, complicated impressions are better than simple impressions. This extends to relationships: the relationship you have with your waiter is a simple one, or with your barber, or your mechanic. The expectations and terms are set. The relationship you have with your mother, or the grandfather who you never see, or your aunt-by-marriage with the bad politics, these are relationships that live in the ether of unpredictability, of in-definition, and these are the relationships that are real. This extends to places as well: the places we visit and love are good. Paris is historic, Tokyo is stimulating, Florence is majestic. They are objectively outside of you, and the things outside of us will always retain a patina of unknowing, and therefore allure. We love the things we ourselves are outside of, because what we love is actually the idea of a thing.
However, these are relationships that are simple, and uncomplicated, and for which the terms are clear from the onset: we are here to be impressed, and the assumption is that we will be wooed. Our relationship with the place from which we are from is not so simple. It is complicated, and glorious, and painful, and sentimental, and violent. We are as unable to tear these places from our inner-selves as we are able to dissect our heart from our chest and still remain alive. The veins and arteries between ourselves and our geographies, our birth-geographies, are fused into an inalienable mass that no matter how far we wander away, we are still attached by something that we cannot dissolve and still remain ourselves.
As I prepare for the talk I’m giving next week on “Designing for Cities” at the DSVC National Student Show, I’ve had to think a lot about what I’ve started to think of as design citizenship. From my notes:
An important part of design citizenship, of designing things in order to enhance and edify the conversations between citizens in your city, and perhaps your world, is to become a participant not only in the process, but in the result. By this I mean, if I were to only design for these [cultural events] based on some creative briefs and a Google Doc of copy, I’m not designing from a citizen’s point-of-view. I’m designing from a contractor’s point-of-view.
When it comes to designing for cities, and therefore for the people in cities, the difference between client services and cultural collaboration is your physical presence, and willingness to participate beyond your discipline. Approaching your projects from this perspective will only make you more informed, more, excited, and more qualified to do the work well.
This is somewhat echoed in a quote from Katherine McCoy that I ran across today:
“We must stop inadvertently training our students to ignore their convictions and be passive economic servants. Instead, we must help them to clarify their personal values and to give them the tools to recognize when it is appropriate to act on them.”
The question then become, of course, how do we do this as design educators? How do we support the growth of ideology in tandem with a more tactile design skillset, and how do we do this without imposing ideology on them, whether that ideology be cultural or aesthetic? How does this relate to citizenship? This is my great struggle at the moment.
“Every designer is ideologist, even in situations where he or she does not even realize it. The history of graphic design is filled with symbolic cues about the attitudes and beliefs of client, designer, and audience. This ideological aspect becomes the potent link between design history and social history. The corporate designer embraces a philosophy of capitalism, the advertising designer advocates consumption, the social activist designer protests and demands action. The designer who does not see himself or herself as an ideologue is a sleepwalker oblivious to his or her social role.”
Philip Meggs, from a lecture presented in 1994 at the Universidad de las Americas Puebla, MX.
The kids have made it their practice to put an Open or Closed sign (or rather, OPAN and CLOSD) on their door to let adults know their visitation rights at any given time. It almost seems, however, like they make these rules only in order to create the exceptions to it. “No one is allowed… except for daddy,” As if the opportunity for benevolence that come with offering restricted access comes quite naturally to 6-year-olds. Indeed, they carry this power with a natural pomposity. Then again, maybe, the signage is just a strategy to stop us from keeping track of how messy their room is.
In the world of “connectiveness”, in which we can never quite be alone, in which all knowledge and all people are accessible at the push of a button (or the wave of a hand or the sound of a voice), I find it interesting that humans have (or, I have) become continually more insecure in self. It seems natural that with such tools of reassurance at our constant disposal (Yes, I am here. Yes, I care. Yes, you matter), our more insecure tendencies would become dull over time, bored of the casual accessibility of our world, and would therefore transition to something…different. As if the objects themselves (the objects of connection) would exude a soothing aura. However, I have felt the opposite to be true; my ability to “unplug” is not tied to my followers, or likes, or any popular social metric (platforms which I have largely divorced myself from), but manifests instead as an insecurity that if am not “present,” not available for my family, for my friends, for my team, them I am not present at all, in any form. As if the worthiness of my existence is contingent on my ability to respond.
I’ve been thinking a lot about reflection and our tendency toward the act, especially as the year turns over once again. I’m usually one who is perhaps overly prone to reflection at these arbitrary points, at this established moment when we can all say “okay, enough of that, I’m sure we can do better.” This year though, I don’t feel the standard impulse. Today is the same as yesterday. I think this imposed self-ignorance (as in, the purposeful suppression of the inner-self) is another outcropping of the suspicion that we’re all living in some kind of M.C. Escher-meets-Edvard Munch construct, one which flaunts a particularly and nonsensically tyrannical suicide wish, and so while my personal days have seemed to flow rather uncorrupted from one to the next in 2017, the weight of living under such an onslaught of absurdity has made reflection rather unappealing.
This tweet and the ensuing conversation reinforced for me once again how inevitable it is that design aesthetic will manifest itself in “movements,” and that even though we’re in a digital era now vs. a purely physical one, this doesn’t mean that a subconsciously collective desire for objective aesthetic standards no longer exists. People, in this case clients, want a style because they want to understand where they fit. I find it interesting when designers don’t acknowledge this, or even (periodically) seem to see it*, when they desire to push beyond what exists and is repeatable in a currently common vernacular because it’s “stale”, without necessarily recognizing its cyclical alignment with similar movements in the past. It’s impossible to view aesthetic standards outside of the contexts of the culture (economic and symbolic) that dictate them. There’s a reason that things start to look the same; because that’s what people will pay for. The market rewards familiarity. This is why design history is such an important aspect of design eduction; this has happened over and over and over.
The question becomes, then, what is the fundamental mission of formal design education? Is it to push the discipline forward, as is the case with so-called “critical” design programs? Or is it to prepare students to operate well within the present commercial market, to be able to take cues from culture, to become effective professional practitioners? Too often I see students who come out of the more academic programs who are completely unequipped to work in the “real world,” while I inversely interview seemingly hundreds of young designers who have slick portfolios, but no critical perspective on the discipline. This dichotomy seems like a failure of design eduction, and is probably what we should be working on fixing.
*At this point I'm reaching way back into provoked memory, far past the cited tweet, which at face value I actually agree with.
“The danger for the leader comes if you cannot truly love yourself. If you are at war with yourself then you will be unable to lead others with empathy & compassion. You may pretend—but you will always be found out.” — Alan Moore DO/ DESIGN
As I was flipping through Alan Moore’s very pleasant book “Do/ Design: Why Beauty is Key to Everything” last night, I settled on this passage, and found it to contain a brief observation that perhaps defines my last couple of years more aptly than most. The last year especially has been an exercise in coming to glaring terms with my inadequacies, both personally and professionally, and it is only recently that I have been able to begin to more objectively recognize the often self-imposed dissonances, conflicts of self-identity or labeling or striving, that have made it difficult not only to seek “Happiness,” but to even recognize that “Loving One’s Self” (i.e. Happiness) is a thing that is particularly valuable. Or, perhaps, a thing that even really exists (in contrast to Achievement, or Virtue, or Legacy, or Impact). It’s easy to forget that your strengths (especially when it comes to leadership) are solely defined by your relationships to people, especially in an inherently human discipline like design. Empathy, compassion, kindness, and helpfulness are all purely relational concepts, and the cultural core of not only a good “design practice” (as if that caveat is necessary), but of everything.
This is easy to forget, though. Your insufficiencies, in contrast, are easy enough to identify even in a void, especially if it's one of your own making.
I hope I’m getting better at remembering the right things.
In design, or any discipline of making, there is a distinct difference between “breaking the rules” and simply being naive of the rules. A reactionary rejection of formally “trained” approaches, the result of conceiving of the these approaches merely as the manifestation of a thoughtless, common vernacular, as nothing but the historically-dictated precedent for popularly “purposeful” design, is not within itself something to be admired. This attitude breeds its own form of anti-intellectualism, and aligns itself with a type of uncritical abandon that these same practitioners would defy in other quarters. Even “breaking the rules” should be a purposeful exercise, which necessitates a fluency in the language that is ultimately being rejected. Willful ignorance isn’t admirable in any venue, even in design or (gasp) art.
— El Lissitzky, 1923
It never ceases to amaze me how dependent cultural movement is on the Forcefully Declared Techno-futurist Opinion. My inability to claim objective truth in overtly subjective realms (in this case, the realms of medium and execution) cements my temporality as a designer, I'm afraid. History doesn't smile on the flexible.
Borders are not the razor-thin divisions between who we are and who we are not, but are instead the broad, frenetic, fertile territories in which we are forced to confront the cultural fictions on which we have been raised.
Periodically I wonder if I overanalyze the cultural role of what I do, of graphic design, or branding, or whatever we're calling it today, as it seems to me like I can see it everywhere (not merely in object but in intent), in everything, in everyone, a universal force that is somehow culturally critical, socially critical, commercially critical, and individually critical. I see it, but do not know if what I see is what exists, or if it is merely a shadow cast by the rest of my life (life-as-practice), a manifestation of self-perception, of priorities and opinions. I see it, on good days, as a conduit that connects the past (both globally and individually) with the present, with a clear eye to the future. Being uniquely an art but with the aura of objectivity (of measurability, of “success” and “failure”) it allows for a perhaps unholy union between money and image, particularly money as the validating measure of self-image, particularly money as the dowery for this, an eternal perception that can help not only formulate goals, but parse psyche, and then translate into this, the "supposedly universal language" (that of symbols), and because of this it seems as though design (graphic design) is much more a question of psychoanalysis than it is of art. Design is interpretation, design is translation, and then again, it is both of these things balanced in that awkward borderland between monetary value and self-value that makes the discipline so unique, and so human, and so ripe for either abuse or under-valuation. Once a designer leans too much into the commercial (“marketing”) or the analytical (“academic”) the goal of their discipline invariably shifts, shifts either into economy or into “criticism”, both of which have their place on a spectrum, but neither of which engage with the true potential of the practice. This is the everlasting tension.
"That will be $2.17."
The man with the baby flipped the iPad around, allowing me to scribble something akin to my signature with my finger. The baby was tiny, and wide-eyed, and could barely hold his head up. He was wearing tiny overalls and seemed engaged in his work, the work of being a baby, a baby that was being held by his father behind the counter of a cafe, a father who was balancing the joys and inconveniences of both fatherhood and employment, both literally and figuratively, here in this very moment. The father passed the child to someone else behind the counter so he could pull an espresso shot. The tiny human maintained his vocational focus, a single-minded dedication to Being a Baby. He sucked his fist in concentration. His task was clear.
“in order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin with in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd—the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals.”
John Dewey begins Art and Experience by reflecting on the aesthetic value of art, and very quickly latches onto the fact that you cannot understand an aesthetic object without understanding its intent. You can enjoy a piece of art without a creation narrative, but you cannot understand it. I would posit that this is the same with design, as much as we like to point out the differences between art and design, because art, in the public sphere, becomes part of an aesthetic environment with purpose (i.e., it has become “designed.”) Where this reality, the fuzzy dissipation of objectivity, becomes problematic is in the context of critique. What is the role of critique outside of a critique of process? What is the role of critique outside of a critique of effectiveness? Perhaps this is where design diverges so drastically from art, as critique not longer becomes a question of object but a question of intent. The only avenue for productive criticism is “does this do what you intended it to do?”
This is why every critique ends up being, at its core, a critique of human intent.
"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
— Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire
"The 'personal' is crucial now not because it stands in contra-distinction to globalization, because it doesn't really. Globalization is everywhere—within and outside our skin. No, personal perspective is important because it brings the designer into design—the human being into the problem."
— Michael Shmidt, "Hello Ms. Hernandez'
Question: is it really desirable for design to be “timeless?” Can a designed object exist outside of time? Could it not, instead, be more valuable for Design (n.) to exist as a reflection of the cultural climate in which it is made? This comes back to the question of whether Design (v.) is primarily object-oriented or process-oriented, whether a project can ever really be perceived as “complete” or whether we merely dictate punctuated release points along an iterative infinity.
A continuation of a prior theme: ever so often I ponder a unique brand of imposter’s syndrome that many designers seem to experience, a particularly mirror-bound attitude in which we are consistently disappointed with what we make because it all looks like stuff that we could have made. We exist in a state of being unsurprised by ourselves. Designers as a whole are not know for a (public) lack of egotism, but I sense that this nagging feeling that exists at the junction of “this solves the problem” and “not exactly in the way that I wanted it to” is a pretty standard sentiment. It’s much harder to accommodate the unexpected when we define the expectations ourselves. At least personally, the fact that I am too intimately familiar with my own processes can be a deterrent to satisfaction with the work that I do (but then, perhaps, it is also what continually prods me to tweak my own methods and practice.) Is this something to be fixed, or something to embrace as part of the emotional arc of a project?
(In other news, I am going to start sending out extremely periodic internet mailings, and you can sign up for them here.)
I woke up to an empty Wednesday.
From Politics and Method, by Ahmed Ansari:
“Design tools and methods are thus never, as most toolkits and models claim, value neutral, but always arrive laden with political and cultural baggage. The claim that packages delivering design methods to social designers and workers in the developing world are 'neutral', in the sense that they are just methods, and that politics lies in the domain of their human users, is false. [...] This is the most frightening thing about the uncritical adoption of design toolkits: that in becoming the de-facto way of practicing social design in the hands of powerful actors like government organizations and foreign-funded NGOs, they crowd out alternative voices that would caution models of development based on unconstrained growth.”
This is a paradoxical weakness of some human-centered design methodologies, in that so many of them end up becoming prescriptive, and therefore divorced from the tenets that originally defined them. It is not uncommon, in my experience, for these practices to push forward what are deemed “universal values,” such as efficiency or quick iteration, when in fact these practices can at times be in direct conflict with the cultural norms of a given place. In the end, truly “efficient” methodologies are those that integrate the most seamlessly with specific cultural norms and practices. Sometimes slow iteration just works better, sometimes very very slow iteration works the best. But regardless: design is a critical exploration, not a universal truth.
In this upside down world, perhaps the “dreams,” or the inelegant proxies for dreams, are “ideals” or “principles”, absolutes (or perceived absolutes) that are so lofty that they will never be met. It is almost guaranteed that they will never be met, because so often we idolize the measures that we perceive as beyond that which we, ourselves, have the capacity to achieve. The dark side of dreams. Especially unsatisfying because while dreams carry with them the subtle promise of ecstasy, or at the very least of gratification, “principles” merely carry with them the concept of a somber baseline. The minimum. And when we find that our own self-imposed minimums are seemingly beyond our capacity to achieve, and continually achieve at that, then life seems dark and sad and a failure.
Perhaps, though, principles are the things that we feel like we can control.
I find myself these days vacillating between the guilt of inactivity and the frenetic mindspace of having a lot of ideas that seem to be in conflict with my daily tasks, and the knowledge that I need to extend myself the grace to take it easy from time to time. This conflicts with my "principles." This conflicts with my desire to control. This is not easy.
Tonight was the first Clinton/ Trump presidential debate. Instead of watching it I chose to take a night walk in the neighborhood. I felt no need to witness what I could so vividly imagine. As I strolled under the streetlights, the glow of giant televisions behind seemingly every curtain caught my eye, the distinct blue and red hues of the evening’s Universal Programming finding their way subtly into the darkness. I thought to myself that, this time, perhaps we are all paying attention?
I’ve been reading a fair number of critical essays on the current state of (graphic) design this week, and yesterday I found myself slowly descending into a manic mental hole where, completely overstimulated, I couldn’t get a grip on what I agreed and disagreed with. I couldn’t quiet my mind. Not great for sound sleep.
Almost universally, the essays called for an increase in critical practice, a lambasting of the “old guard” (think: Pentagram, et. al) for thinking too archaically in this modern era, and a disregard for formalism of any kind. However, this morning I woke up with a clearer recognition of the large hole in this critical theory that had been bumping around in the back of my mind; I had seen no acknowledgment of the graphic designer (particularly, the brand designer) as the translator of a client’s own self-perception. While we like to think of communication design as a two-party process (client -> designer -> audience, or simply designer -> audience), in fact the process can more often than not be client -> designer -> client. A huge part of our particular responsibility is clarifying who clients are to themselves. Sometimes designers are mirrors, not bullhorns. More comprehensive thoughts on this to come.
Peter Buwert on Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique”:
“Once something has become habitual and familiar, it effectively becomes an acceptable component of our perceived reality. Shklovsky’s warning however, is that we are liable to apply this tactic to situations which should never be considered normal or acceptable: things which should be known not as normal but as wonderful, or terrible. If we degrade things which are truly extraordinary by accepting them as merely ordinary, we are either denying ourselves the pleasure of appreciating the abnormally good, or willfully subjecting ourselves to the horrors of the abnormally bad. In order to fully experience life it is necessary to recognize, appreciate and respond to the truly extraordinary things.”
This is a cogent observation and absolutely true. I wonder, however, if perhaps it should be extended a bit; in order to fully experience life it is necessary to recognize, appreciate and respond to even the truly ordinary things.
“I think one of the disappointing moments of my life was when I walked into the Louvre and there was a Starbucks there. I mean, go Starbucks, I guess.”
What is the difference between desire and craving? Is this merely a question of etymological variance, or is there a fundamental discrepancy between these two profound motivators? I heard an observation yesterday that a craving is something that is something temporal enough that, if you can appropriately externalize your perspective, will pass you by without digging its way into you. Is this the same with desire, or is desire more intimately tied to need, to that-which-sustains-you? I don’t know. Sometimes they just feel different to me.
In this new post-MFA life, I find that it is once again up to me to define the limits of my exploration of the discipline of graphic design. Without the construct of school, I’ve had to dip my toes back into the muddled eddies of the “personal project,” and once again the tension between The Professional and The Personal expressions of a design perspective becomes clear. The unrest that lies between the role of interpreter (the expression of the external) and the role of translator (the expression of the internal). So far I have seen scant evidence that this sustained dissonance ever truly resolves, but is that any reason to resign yourself to it? I still don't really know.
No matter how many years I design professionally, I never quite get over the perennial dissatisfaction of making things that look like things I would make. I wonder at times if this is a universal burden borne by all actively creative people; we seem to find ourselves in the infinite loop of being disappointed with the things that we personally have the capacity to create. “If I can make this, it can’t be that good.” We are only enamored by the things that we seem unable to conceive of creating ourselves. The process is hidden, which makes it alluring. We bask in the glorification of the unknowing.
This morning I was reading my friend Jennifer's essay on the limits of critique, and it brought me back to a topic I've been personally negotiating for a while. Specifically, the vast divide between graphic design criticism and graphic design as criticism. The question is not whether these are two specific disciplines (they obviously are, there is no question), but whether the same person can negotiate each of the disciplines separately. Can a designer also critique in any objective sense, or does true critique require the distance of the non-practitioner? Similarly, can design function with social critique as its primary object, and how does this specific function of graphic design affect its place as a subsequent object of critique?
Now that I’m done with grad school, I can FINALLY relax
...by making this list of eight unfathomably large personal projects.
“Just want this Topo Chico today man?”
Yes, thanks. I’m just going to be here for a minute.
“I just pulled a shot and need to practice my latte art. Want a cappuccino on the house?”
Uh, sure dude.
“Don’t judge me, I’m just learning how to do it.”
This town is filled with caffeinated enablers.
Some unused scribblings from my recent Creative Mornings talk on Reality:
What are you talking about? This can either be a simple answer, or a complex one. So often in graphic design, the commercial realm of creativity, what we say is dictated to us by those outside of ourselves, whether those people are bosses, clients, or collaborators. We don’t always get to choose what we say. However, we should always remain awake to what we are saying. We should remain aware. The fact is that words have the power to create reality on some level, and as participants in that creation, we need to remain active. Reality is what we encounter when we are awake. It is our responsibility, as the creators, to verify that what we are saying coordinates with who we are. Once these two realities diverge into dissonance, that is when we start to enter the realm of fantasy.
I think if I was given the opportunity to immediately eliminate one personal tendency, I think it would be my ability to pay close attention to myself.
I just stumbled across this quotation in one of my notebooks, dated three years ago today:
"According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves."
— Annie Dillard
"Your children are beautiful. When you get a gift like children, you don't even have to ask if you made the right choices."
With that, our long-haired, bespeckled Uber driver turned off his meter and drove us the rest of the way for free.
Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.
—Robert Frost
Eight days until my last final, and then I can get back to this. So go the good intentions.
This evening I sat in a coffee shop finishing up a school project. A pounding dance remix of some sort was plugged into my eardrums, effectively drowning out the peripheral thoughts. This is my usual custom when a deadline is looming.There was no separation between my mind and the rhythm. A girl across the room stood up and started to dance. The dichotomy of her movements with my music created a surreally slow-motion collision between what was internal and what was external. She danced on, then noticed people watching her and stopped in embarrassment.
I love the winter and I love the rain. It makes me feel a little sad, but that seems natural. I mistrust the heat of summer.
I rolled into my mechanic’s garage this morning. “That time of year again,” I said, handing over my keys for an inspection. He honked the horn once, and declared “Well, that was easy. Seven bucks.”
When your car is 33 years old, it’s good to keep on good terms with your mechanic.
“People need dreams, there’s as much nourishment in ‘em as food.”
— Dorothy Gilman
I think it’s probably healthiest for most of life to remain a dream of one kind or another.
This week we are re-decorating the office a bit, which necessitates moving furniture here and there in order to appropriately situate desks, chairs, new rugs, etc. While some people find these movements stimulating and exciting, I find the process disturbing. Everyone is moving at the peripheral of my vision. I draw deeper into my office, finding comfort in the perceived permanence of everything in its place.
This afternoon as I sat in a coffee shop I witnessed a young student perusing an ancient-looking book. The streaks in her blonde hair still spoke of our prolonged Texas summer, and she sipped on an espresso with a distracted air that promised a cold end to the experience. The text on the page was in Greek. Totally engrossed, the girl took a brief note in the margin and flipped to the next page.
This evening I found myself in a dark second-story bar. A reunion of some sort was in progress, the hum of out-of-towners a gentle overlay to clink of glasses and background prattle of a football game on the TV. A man begins to strum on the guitar, his mic check a low rumble. He starts to sing James Taylor in the voice of Tom Waits. I am not displeased.
As I stare into the mirror, pondering the latest in a series of skin blemishes that are the handiwork of the dermatologist who is gradually turning me into a human golf ball, I think that perhaps the Gnostics were onto something after all.
A couple of days ago I put down some brief thoughts on sports, and how their affect on our psyche seems unique in the modern age. Paul Hayward verbalizes this intimately in his Telegraph article, in which he relates how sport (one Lionel Messi performance, in particular) sustained him through intensive cancer treatments. His musings on the power of sport to sustain hope are personal and profound.
I thought about the time when I had triplet infants, all requiring bottle feeding every three hours around the clock, and the weeks spent watching game after game, match after match all night long as I rotated through the bottles, each round taking an hour-and-a-half. The situation was very different, but the need for endurance was present nonetheless, as was the need for company. The struggle of others on the field served as a proxy for my own. Their wins were my wins.
Bill Shankly, legendary Liverpool manager, put it aptly when he said "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that."
A note hastily scrawled in my sketchbook:
“Why do we so often look at, when we need to look into?”
It’s fascinating how profoundly sports can affect your mood and sense of well-being. Such an intimate tie to the human spirit in some ways, really the only example of this exact social phenomenon that I can identify. Why do we invest ourselves so thoroughly in the outcomes of these contests, in the performances of these people we don’t even know? Tonight my team lost a key playoff match. I came away from it feeling like the whole weekend was ruined, like the whole week ahead of me was aimless and futile. This is silly, but the feeling remains.
Today is the day when children can dress up like adults and adults can dress up like children. A day for yo-yo fantasy.
Imposter Syndrome, that fickle but universal companion. I’m not sure what provokes (or maintains) these bouts of insecurity in my case, especially as I grow older, more experienced, and presumably more secure. A flawed presumption, obviously. I wonder at times if perhaps these shallows creep up when I am more isolated (many times only subconsciously), which can even happen at times when I am highly productive, often because I am being highly productive. This is the paradox of productivity vs. validation. I find it impossible to validate my own work.
“The good thing about saying ‘it’s beautiful’ of a work of art is that when you say that you aren’t saying anything.”
— Susan Sontag
Then again, we probably say too much as it is.
Some days my daily scribblings don’t have a place here. This has been the case recently, as I have been pouring myself (slightly against my will) into finalizing my thesis proposal for the University. Daily words, yes, but isolated to a single unassailable document. Works cited and bibliographies. Literature reviews and proofs. Moving beyond these strictures into something less monotonous is difficult, and an exercise not worth pursuing at this point. I must make peace with the boundaries.
The stack of books, the one right beside my bed, just keeps growing and growing. Almost nightly a new title makes its way to the top of the stack, usurping the spot of whatever poor novel or obtuse political science tome had previously topped the pile. The briefest ascent, the shortest rein. Somehow I barely even touch the books themselves, as I am almost inevitably too tired to dive into anything of substance by the time I climb under the sheets. Still, the books remain. I’m not really sure what purpose they serve, some kind of subconscious security blanket. A proxy for ambition? Perhaps they remind me of the inertia of life, that “someday” I will get to those books, and perhaps as I’m falling asleep the reminder that tomorrow exists is what I need the most.
“Have you ever gone to confession before? Oh man, it’s going to rock your world. It is the worst. The greatest and the worst.”
Tonight I accidentally walked into a book store poetry performance. The man on stage, perhaps 45 with a slicked-back haircut, propelled himself through his material with the velocity of a speedboat through the choppy surf. There was a machine gun elegance to it, the melody being sacrificed to the rhythm. When he was done, he sheepishly nodded through the applause, and sat down without comment.
Today I was asked to give a public talk on realism, specifically on remaining professionally realistic. Perhaps I am uniquely qualified for this topic due to my distaste for it. I maintain an intense, lingering desire to remain apart. Realism is not my strength. However, it is an edge on which I must balance, hovering awkwardly in the realm of what I think of as a living expressionism, a strange type of organic diorama that is constantly vacillating between impressionism and representationalism. This is the sweet spot. However, the path is narrow, and it would be easy to misstep to either side. I've peered over the edge, and the drop is long.
On trying to make beautiful things: my thoughts on this are clouded and untouchable. While there are those who believe that beauty can be created on purpose, I question that. Of course it is quite possible to attempt the creation of a beautiful thing, but its ultimate form is outside the extended hand of human control. We can attempt and we should attempt, but we we should never expect or be disappointed. This is the basic tension that frames the space between waking and sleeping.
Let us consider for a moment the phrase “it makes no sense that…” as a statement of belief, of conviction, and not of fact. Let us consider it in the context of an economic statement (i.e., it “makes no sense that” interest on a student loan is higher than interest on a car loan). It is possible (and necessary) to take ethical stances on things like economics, and a declaration of ethical conviction is functions as a declaration of “sense” (or a belief in sense). It is a sort of of confession of faith. However, in the case of economics and forces of the “free” market, it is often expressed that these highly technical arenas are beyond the subjective flows of conviction and live in the realm of cold logic and patterns. This is only the case if we let this be the case.
Tonight we made our way to Aurora, the whole family in tow, prepared for the spectacle of public art. Public, that is, except for the parking, which was geographically inaccessible and $25. Public, with a caveat. The art was inventive and surreal, though the enjoyment was tempered by the inherently frightening collision of darkness and noise (from the perspective of the children) along with the crushing waves of humanity that filled the streets. However, the overpopulation of an art installation is not something I am willing to complain about. My kids, however, might think differently.
The background is not the border.
Pablo Picasso once wrote, “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.”
The brain is usually a water pump. It is rarely a stream or an ocean. The labor keeps you fit, but drowning is still a possibility.
“Daddy, you are pretty.”
“I am?”
“Yeah. Do you know what that means?”
“What does it mean?”
“It means that you say very nice things.”
This morning I walked through a spider web. I just opened my door and took a step, and with that step I destroyed the work of hours, of days (from the perspective of the spider), maybe years, maybe a lifetime (if there were eggs or baby spiders hidden in the weave) and I just walked through it.
Poof.
As I stood in line to check into my flight back to Texas, I listened to a group of retired ladies behind me discuss the younger generations. With one voice they bemoaned how young people are always in their phone, how our society is moving backwards, how kids aren’t even taught cursive in school anymore. What a shame, they say, what a real shame. Not in our day, they said. This is an endless and exhausting refrain.
A species in evolution cannot perceive their changes while still in the midst.
“Feel free to experiment. If you’re afraid, you’ll never improve.”
— From Florian Heinzen-Ziob film Original Copy
This weekend at Point Oh was time well spent. Kind people, genuine speakers, an ideal mix of restful reservation (uncommon at conference such as this) and candid communication. The event was topped off with a full day of films at the Design Film Festival. The audience was intimate and the films were beautiful.
Unedited sketchbook note from yesterday:
“Degrees of separation. Design as degrees of separation. Talk of design 'changing the world.' Perhaps it can, but only with a reduced degree of separation. Not in abstraction. Abstraction can influence, but if an object/idea influences in abstraction, it becomes art perhaps? Unsure if this is the case. Design as an agent of change is already at least one contextual point removed from a direct agent, in that it filters through the perception and experiences of each independent individual.”
This is why I rarely get anywhere.
Tonight I made my way over to Washington Square Park. This is a NYC tradition for me (as it is with millions of other periodic pilgrims), as I enjoy the spontaneity and energy of the NYU crowd mixed with the generational locals who can always be found there. As I walked past the chess tables I noted a disheveled senior playing chess with an elementary-aged boy. The boy’s dad sat beside him on the bench, staying out of the game, but keeping a watchful eye on the boys tactics. The older man was teaching the youngster how to force a mate with two bishops. I wonder if he’ll remember.
Today I flew into Brooklyn for my yearly conference jaunt, this time to the newly-minted Point Oh gathering. My AirBNB host left the keys under a mat in the entry way. I find that my perspective on New York is different now that I actually live in a neighborhood I truly love, which hasn't been the case during some of my past visits. It’s as if I can enjoy NY for what it is without experiencing that mournful longing that seems to be such a universal impression for the young and hopeful. I no longer need to devour the city like a last meal. This makes it slower, smaller, and easier to gently inhale.
Today I read a series of essays written between Ernst Bloch and György Lukács in 1938. In these texts they debate the merits of German expressionism in a “modern” age. Bloch, an idealist, views expressionism as an enlightened presentation of the spirit. Lukács, a realist, believes that art can only be genuine if it reflects an objective, representational reality. Their arguments are passionate and eloquent. At the end though, my original question still remained; how could they possibly care that much? How does art become aesthetic theology?”
As I turned the key in my ignition, only to be greeted by a resounding silence, I took a moment to ponder the subtle surrealness of my situation. I was on a nearly abandoned downtown block in a section of the city that would, in only a few hours, be completely inaccessible due to a James Franco movie shoot. It was midnight. All cars had to be off the street by 6am or they would be towed. My phone was dead and my wife was at home.
I went ahead and turned the key one more time, just to check.
Today, for the 4th time in my life, the Texas Rangers won their division. 162 games, and it all came down to the last inning (as it really always should). Moments like these make me reflect again on the power of pro sports teams, and particularly the Rangers in my case, to remain a constant throughout life almost akin to an uncle or an older cousin. Someone you can root for from a distance without truly knowing. However, after couple of traumatic near-championships, I find the prospect of facing another postseason not unlike preparing for that same favorite uncle to go under the knife for major surgery. I can sit and hope, but the role of a passive observer is excruciating.
And yet, this is what we do to ourselves “for fun.”
“Daddy, does R2-D2 like sandwiches?”
Well kid, I have literally never considered the possibility.
Leave your stick in the dirt. Stick it up to its shoulder in the dirt.
"You can't better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied."
— R. Buckminster Fuller
See: the modern American political climate.
As I return home and resume my more traditional routines, I enter an in-breath. A subtle pause before the exhale. At this point in my life, I’m always ready for the exhale and resent the immobility of the stabilizing diaphragm.
Spent all of today wandering the city, trying to get lost (mostly unsuccessfully). By the end of it I had trodden 12.5 miles altogether. The highlights were the bookstores, especially William Stout, which is my version of heaven. By the end of it, though, I had realized that traveling along has lost much of its appeal. It’s easy to become lonely, especially in the crowds.
Last night I stayed on my friend’s fishing boat, which he keeps at a residential dock in Sausalito. My stay corresponded with the blood moon/lunar eclipse, and so I found myself sitting on a folding chair with the population of the dock who were in the midst of a astronomic potluck. We ate baked potatoes and beans and brownies. The moon slowly faded until only a sliver remained, and we retired to the boat’s deck where we smoked pipes and sipped mulled wine. The boat kept slowly rocking until it became to chilly to sit outside. The moon stayed the same.
Subjective observation: in San Francisco the people look like “normal” people, even though the cost of living is so high. Not like the comparable parts of New York, where so many exude money and class (or, at least trendiness). How can people live in this area and still maintain a certain level of mainstream taste? Maybe that points to a more transient lifestyle, one in which the population of a city ebbs and flows with greater rapidity. A temporary population. Of course, perhaps the citizenry is just influenced by the more inherently casual culture of the west coast. Then again, maybe I am totally wrong about this whole thing.
I arose early this morning to head to the airport. The sun was still a few from awakening. I poked around in the darkness of my room, trying to quietly pack the remaining items I would need in San Francisco this weekend. The cat had found his way into my bag again and I almost removed his tail with the zipper. My driver was prompt, swift, and silent. I opened up Claudia Rankine’s Citizen as we sat silently on the terminal. The sun rose as I lifted into the sky.
Somehow, though the elements are the same, the truth of each is slightly different.
Alan Watts once stated that “Buddha’s doctrine was that man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are impermanent.”
In the end though, I don’t know if we fear the loss quite as much as we fear the losing. The fading things are more terrifying than those that have already disappeared. If there was a way that the things we value could vanish without our cognizance or our memory, I don’t think that we would long for them again. What we crave is a convenient amnesia.
From the internet comments:
“Most conservatives in the U.S. claim to value community and tradition, but really are liberals who promote a crass capitalism that undermines cultural and social solidarity. Real conservatives should find more in common with the radical critics from the Left than the free market liberalism that passes for conservatism in the U.S.”
Always remember that the spectrum is a circle.
This week at work has been a little bit slow. This means that there is no real rush to do anything, no immediate deadlines, no real juggling. My thoughts remind me of a bunch of balloons that, without the restraint of an external force, start to fly up into the air in a whirling fury, soon detaching from each other and flying in a hundred different directions. Somehow, I need to pressure to maintain cohesion. I’m not sure if this is good or bad.
Hit a wall with a 1000 pound sledgehammer. Hit a wall with a ton of bricks. Hit a wall with my inalienable rights. Hit a wall with the baggage of countless generations of prior cynics. Hit a wall with my fist of tyrannical hope.
Today I snuck off by myself to see the new Bobby Fischer biopic, Pawn Sacrifice. The theater was sparsely attended. Everyone was there alone.
Apparently chess movies aren’t really hotbeds of dating activity.
“Daddy, it is hard being a grown-up. And it is hard being a kid.”
This morning I stepped into my barber shop for a haircut. My barber greeted me heartily and said he hadn’t seen me in forever, what have I been up to? Apparently not getting haircuts, I said. I settled in. He asked me how short I wanted to go this time, I said last time I think you did a #1, but let’s go shorter. Sounds like you want to go full bald, he said. I said ok. A minute later a woman walked into the shop. She was deaf, but started writing quickly on a pad. She needed money to pay her last hospital bill. My barber pulled a wad of cash from his drawer with his fully tattooed hands, handing it to the woman. Her face radiated surprise and something near ecstasy, and she backed out slowly gesturing her appreciation. My barber started back to his task, snipping away at the top of my head. To the least of these, you know? He said it quietly, as if to himself.
This evening my brain hit a wall, maybe due to some low-grade virus or allergy that is barraging my system. This day has meant little. My focus has been corrupted by the forces of nature. Still, I find it hard to attempt sleep. I just sit here in bed, puttering on my phone, puttering with my books, waiting for the day to feel fully spent. An absurd tug-of-war.
This morning I read an article about the Crawick Multiverse, a land art project by the famous postmodernist architect Charles Jencks. Like many of his other works, the Multiverse brings to life Jencks' interpretations of complex scientific thought, the shapes of galaxies spiraling and snaking their way through an expansive landscape created from dirt and grass and stones. Jencke sees the potential of these raw, empty spaces to mirror what he believes to be a reality beyond that which we can touch with our senses. Beyond that which we can even inhabit at all. This is a universe whose waves carry with them a deep vibration that we will never experience. It exists and expands without our help, a continual out breath. The Crawick Multiverse however, if left to its own devices, would soon descend into chaos. It would decay back into the dirt. This is the price of a pale reflection.
I was flipping through an old journal today and stopped randomly on this passage, written on 4/26/2013:
“There are not actual fragments of our consciousness (referring specifically to the idea of "feeling fragmented”). It seems like we’re constantly being pulled to and fro, into the future from the past, but that’s an illusion. That’s why we grow anxious about the future, because our present-consciousness is unable to understand it. Because it will never be there.
“For some reason, it seems to me like the fact that our present-consciousness is so temporal removes most of the value from it, and that’s why I so easily lose energy and motivation for present (temporal) action. When it comes down to it though, this present mind that is so wrapped up in the future is really the only part of us that is uniquely equipped to engage and interact in this current, physical existence. While it seems like those actions are fleeting and minor, they are the monuments to our moments and to our physical life and world.”
Some things don't really change.
Tonight I had a lengthy conversation with one of my fellow grad students about an art teacher's intuition, and whether or not a contextual aesthetic perspective can be taught. If a person doesn't innately respond to color, motion and the artist's visual intent, are these elements that can be identified with practice? At the very least, we decided, the task of any art education program should be to inform teachers how to teach these critical topics, even if they remain largely hidden to the instructors themselves.
This weekend we finally experienced a brief hint of autumn. The kids spent two days tearing up and down our sidewalk on scooters, periodically crashing into the softer yards of neighbors who have bothered to water their lawns from time to time. At more than one point I hear my daughter shouting “WHOOOOOA I’M ALMOST FALLING I’M ALMOST FALLING!” as her hair streams out of her bright yellow helmet in a receding wave. Her joy is palpable, and it reminds me of the rare times I experience the same unbridled emotion. It’s usually when I’m almost falling as well (though in a different way).
Eigengrau (German: "intrinsic gray" / literally: "own gray") is the uniform gray that we see behind our eyelids when we close them. It is perhaps the most universal color, the background noise of our own individual selves. Own gray. Self-contained, composed of nothing but a reference to itself.
This month a Whole Foods opened a block from my office. While I am a bit chagrined by the idea that I would regularly hang out at an overpriced grocery store, it’s hard to argue with the convenience of a coffee bar and wi-fi and the outdoor balcony seating. I did, however, apparently miss the day where they handed out the yoga pants and muscles.
This evening I am spending some time researching graphic design curriculum while sitting at a bar. I assume that this is just one of the rules.
"An unpopular opinion concerning politics or religion lies concealed in the breast of every man; in many cases not only one sample, but several. The more intelligent the man, the larger the freightage of this kind of opinions he carries, and keeps to himself.
—Mark Twain
Twain is optimistic in his belief that most people restrain from vocalizing their true sentiments for the sake of conformity. I’d posit that most, in fact, do the opposite.
Every time my wife goes out of town, something important implodes. Last time it was our plumbing, this time it’s the radiator on our family car. It’s as if our objects fall into a particularly self-destructive kind of mourning.
I spent this morning lounging at Espumoso. My family was out of town, and so I chose to mark the rare occasion by drinking espresso and reading a bad detective novel. This place somehow remains unfrequented by anyone else I know. It’s a satisfyingly public type of anonymity. As the morning wore on, the neighborhood awakened and the tourist crowds started to emerge from their dens. Most strolled along the sidewalk in groups of three of four. The primary demographic was adult child with parent or parents. I live in the capitol of generational brunch.
This evening I attended a performance of Dracula by the Texas Ballet Theater. I slipped into one of the cheap seats at the last minute, one of those that is tucked into the corner of the balcony in such a way that half the stage is obscured. I was close enough to hear the brush of fabric and constant squeak of shoes that belied the effortless movements. I had a perfect view of the timpani player down in the pit and spent the next two hours caught in his flow.
Tonight, as I closed my eyes to sleep, the field of vision behind my eyelids was filled with a stuttering, frenetic vision as if a thousand black and white birds were pouring out of the sky. Flitting from one edge of the frame to the other, their exact shapes obscured, they cascaded before me like static on a TV. These, perhaps, are my anxieties. I take a deep breath and gently blow the birds away.
Today I read an article which posited that perhaps our search for a “true self” is flawed, in that there is no true self to be found. Only a series of echoes and reflections of our experiences and the stimuli we encounter during the course of our life. The image of a beam of light sprang to my mind, as if we are the white beam that is then broken into various spectrums by a prism. These luminous fragments that appear as individual pieces still only exist within the original light.
The separations, the true “selves”, are only the broken frame of an intangible form.
Re-tie yourself swiftly to the dock.
The importance of making time to daydream doesn’t diminish as we grow older, and I’ve realized in my own life that if I don’t actively seek the times where my mind can wander, then my mental wellness suffers. I think there’s an idea that daydreaming is a child’s activity, since as I (for example) age my wanderings become less about building functional space ships out of tin cans or winning the Tour de France on a BMX bike and more about traveling to Nepal or getting really good at tennis some day. The dreams become more graspable, but are equally as important. Our perspective must roam beyond our experience.
Today brings with it the first class of my last year of MFA study, which has come upon me both more quickly than I expected and more slowly than I would have liked. The methodical ponderousness of grade school or even college doesn’t prepare you for the frenetic pace of being in graduate school as an adult with a job and a family. The rotations get shorter as the funnel grows smaller.
“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
Today we say goodbye to Oliver Sacks, a man who was awake.
This morning at breakfast my daughter declared that she wanted “one thousand pancakes.” I told her that a pile of one thousand pancakes would probably be taller than our house. She considered that for a moment.
“I want two thousand pancakes.”
I read an article today that served as a good follow-up to my thoughts from yesterday. The author, and older gentlemen, theorizes that adults simply lose the emotional resilience to continually be outraged. It takes too long to recover, the aftermath stretches beyond the moment and beyond the issue. This is probably why I find the internet exhausting most days.
As I was driving to work today I spent some time thinking about whether the “mellowing out” of adulthood is inevitable, and how older (i.e. no longer in the throes of youth) people portray a counter-cultural perspective as they age. It seems, at least in my case, that while I still feel the same levels of unrest as I did when younger, I am less likely to purposefully revel in its as I once did. It's too tiring. In the end, though, I supposed that it’s the maintaining of principle that is the most important thing (obviously) while the emotional trappings can wax and wane. Tidal movements.
Roger Caillois, from his book A little Guide to the 15th Arrondissement for the Use of Phantoms, referencing Parisian advertising murals in the early decades of the 20th century:
“I felt a sudden affection for the person at Ivry Storage who had commissioned the mural. I reproached myself for having looked down on the man [as a youth]. Thanks to him, the universe in which I had lived out the first and decisive years of that second life that accompanies our conscious reveries, was restored to me: a collection of unexplained affinities that guide us without our realizing it, a spell whose origin escapes us and takes us prisoner.”
That second life that accompanies our conscious reveries. The advent of adulthood. This corresponds to my own idea that, while periodically I worry that I didn’t express myself adequately in my 20s, I also didn’t have anything useful to say in my 20s. The cement was freshly poured and still free-flowing. Credibility comes as the cement hardens.
Position desired: fulcrum.
Sarah Manguso, from her memoir Ongoingness:
“Why, then, should I continue writing the diary?
In it I digest the time that passes, file it away so I no longer need to think about it, and if I spend all my time thinking about the past I’d stop moving into the future. I begin to write, but no—I’d keep moving. How foolish to believe myself powerful enough to stop time just by thinking.”
How foolish, but how alluring.
I wonder if memories exist outside of the self that created them. Can experiences bring something into the world that did not exist before? Can memories outlive the physical body? If memories and experiences are, in essence, “created objects,” then life itself can be a creative exercise. Otherwise it’s probably just maintenance.
Today I took my son to Adventure Landing. The characteristic patina of the mini golf course awoke nostalgia, even as the moldy plastic zoo animals that surrounded the “lagoon” made me question whether the place had been cleaned since it was constructed in the mid-90s. My son was oblivious to these impressions. His big-picture brain could only take in the whole and not the parts. As we walked back to the car after a long afternoon draped in the sirens and yells of the chaotic arcade, he declared that it had been a “very special day.” I agreed.
As I drifted into the deeper spaces in my morning contemplation, as the usual static of to-dos and emails and preemptive social anxieties started to recede bit by bit, my mind started casually creating images in quiet spaces between the thoughts. In this case, the images were translucent green blocks. The blocks contained my face. They multiplied infinitely and spun in space one by one, quickly snapping together to create a solid wall composed of infinite selves staring back at me. A rubik’s cube of ego.
I was pulled out of it by a door bursting open. The happy yells of a four-year-old who wanted Cheerios.
A house down the street from mine is in the midst of an overhaul, the property overrun with workers from morning until night. As long as I’ve known the house the screened-in porch has been home to a series of porcelain figures, each of them carefully situated on outward-facing shelves to stare at the passers-by. Now the little anthropomorphic creatures are gone, the screen is gone, and I can tell by a sneaky peek through the front window that the sheetrock is gone. Everything is being washed clean. I imagine the small, dusty figures being buried in the backyard or under the house, allowed to rest in peace after keeping the house safe for who knows how long.
This evening it was cooler than usual, almost Autumn-like for Texas, and so after the sun set I stepped out of my house for a long evening walk. After 30 minutes or so I encountered some old stairs laid into the side of a short incline. The concrete edifice was lit by a lonely street lamp, the rest of the street stretching darkly in either direction. I climbed the steps and found myself on another street I was surrounded by the same kind of houses that I had left below. I couldn’t tell any difference.
In the New Yorker this week, we read of Joan Didion:
She…wrote obsessively about herself—not only in her memoirs, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, and “Blue Nights,” about the death of her daughter, but in reported pieces and in personal essays, which she started producing almost as soon as she started publishing. (She eventually got bored with the genre and gave it up. “I didn’t want to become Miss Lonelyhearts,” she said.) She once delivered a lecture called “Why I Write.” She began by pointing out that the sound you hear in those three words is “I, I, I.”
I often wonder what the unedited journals of the truly great memoirists look like. Are they as cyclical as mine seem to be? Are they just bands of sameness, wound tighter and tighter into one another as the years go on? An everlasting ping pong of self-analysis. This is both unsatisfying and also necessary. Our present is built on a mountain of discarded selves.
Consider August 7-16 a symbolic void. Consider it an exercise in humility and futility, and at the same time, an opportunity for self-grace and the next step forward. The burden of “catching up” weighs down the present in preference to the past. These days are small details etched in the shadows of today and tomorrow.
I’ve always loved Jenny Holzer’s work, specifically her mediums and contexts. That’s why I find her Dallas Cowboys commission weirdly jarring. I feel like we have lost her thread.
I returned from a meeting this afternoon to find a link to an open letter from a design professional to a student who had requested honest feedback. The tone of the letter rubbed me the wrong way, and I composed some brief commentary. Primarily, I was struck by the inappropriateness of using the public conversation for feedback in this way, especially in a format without conversation, context or background. True feedback requires true curiosity, not just self-satisfaction.
“It has been said, quite accurately, that a psychotic person is drowning in the very same thing that a mystic swims in.”
This week the temperature will be over 105 every day, which means that we are deep into Texas hibernation. I spend 9 hours a day alone in my office. The gentle hum of the fan pushing around warm air keeps me company.
My son dug out our "chess game board” yesterday and asked me to teach him to play. We spent an hour learning all the pieces and the positions. Then he invented a few of his own moves and checkmated me with ease.
Historically I don’t like swimming pools, but the joy with which my kids approach the whole affair is infectious, and this morning I found myself enjoying the splashes and shouts of a community pool filled with neighborhood children. A father was in the deep end with his daughter. She struggled to swim from the wall to him, gurgling and gulping accompanying panicked strokes. As she tired, he scooped her up and deposited her back to the wall. The whole thing repeated indefinitely.
This morning at 3:00am I awoke with a ice pick migraine. This use to happen to me weekly before I started nightly treatment for sleep apnea. Now they are rare enough that any time it happens I experience a moment of panic, wondering if I’m finally having a stroke. Slowly, however, the pain faded away, and I was able to drift back into sleep.
In the morning I remembered that the migraine had awakened me from a sad dream.
“Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It’s going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate.”
Pema Chödrön, from her book The Wisdom of No Escape. While she was no doubt referring to the agony and ecstasy of everyday life, I circled this quote to remind me to approach my clients the same way. As work, so is life.
If time is an illusion, is my jet lag an illusion?
Today I sat for two or three hours in the New York Cafe, watching the rain splatter against the window while the houseboats in the harbor swayed gently in the swells. I nursed a cappuccino until it was too cold to drink. In the corner, an older man in a Sleepless in Seattle t-shirt worked steadily on the daily crossword. This morning was the second time that I’ve seen him there. He was wearing the Sleepless in Seattle t-shirt yesterday too.
In the 1920s, prostitution was Ketchikan’s number one industry. Today I hiked down the aptly-named Married Man’s Trail to the former red light district known as Creek Street. The path over and past a rushing waterfall. The salmon doggedly crept against the current, looking for a place to spawn.
This morning we awoke at 4am to go fishing. We each paid $40 for a license and headed out on a 30-year-old motor boat. We saw a bald eagle flying overhead with a fish in its claws. Our captain told us that this was some of the deepest water in the world and that he had rescued 16 different people in a single summer. Most of them had run out of gas, though a few had been swamped by waves.
The water was mostly quiet, but about an hour in a pink salmon took my bait. As I was reaching for the net, the line went slack and the fish disappeared.
I spent my first morning in Ketchikan reading on a bench by the ocean. As the hours passed a few cruise liners pulled into port, disgorging hundreds of mouse-eared tourists into the commercial downtown to buy jewelry and Alaska sweatshirts and canned salmon. Several tourists walked past me, their faces exhibiting confusion as to why I was sitting instead of shopping. Apparently people go to Alaska to shop.
Texas, Airplane, Salt Lake City, Airplane, Seattle, Airplane, Ketchikan. Transitional places, both physical and mental. The disassociation of self.
I will awaken at 3am tomorrow to head to Alaska, which means that I will toss and turn until then. I love experiencing new places, but I do not enjoy airports or packing or any of the secondary aspects of getting from one place to another. I do not do well in transition.
Anne Garréta, from her 1986 novel Sphinx:
“How often did I imagine myself gripped with terror, collapsing, tumbling from the height of the relative safety of whatever promontory I had been occupying? A fall brought about by the purely internal and continually foreseen rending, imminently suspended on a final thread that never broke but which, taut and twisted unbearably, never ceased to tremble. The agonizing tension of always being about to crack without ever feeling the relief of chaos—for I denied myself even the obscene plenitude of annihilation.”
The universality of this sentiment to anyone who has struggled with the “mental dismal” is striking, but aside from this fact I took two things away: first, don’t be afraid of long sentences. Second, look up plenitude and use it regularly.
In the past few weeks the kids have been more obviously transitioning from being young, visceral children to a more refined version of themselves. Fewer tantrums about the amount of milk in a cup, more interest in tracing letters, adding numbers and what species a bird is. This point of transition is both refreshing and fluid.
That said, this morning our house almost sonically imploded because we were out of “round cereal.”
This afternoon I went to a Bernie Sanders town hall meeting in downtown Dallas. When he got up to speak the first thing he noted was that his advisors had asked him “if you’re running for President of the United States, why are you going to Texas?” As I walked through the teeming crowds to enter the standing-room-only ballroom, I was curious to see what type of people would show up to a Bernie Sanders rally. The answer ended up being “every type of person”. I suppose that’s his whole point.
At the Fort Worth Scottish Festival this afternoon, I was greeted by the flushed faces of people whose blood was never supposed to weather a Texas July. The wool kilts represented both dedication and misery. I wonder; why do all these Americans love bagpipes so much? Can that affinity be passed down like a bad chromosome?
Susan Sontag wrote:
“Art is the grand condition of the past in the present. To become “past” is to become “art”.
Works of art have a certain pathos.
Their historicity? Their decay? Their veiled, mysterious, partly inaccessible aspect?
The fact that no one would (could) ever do that again?
Perhaps, then, works only become art—they are not art.
They become art when they are a part of the past.”
This concept fits nicely with my own that a person cannot self-identify as an artist. Art comes into existence when an object is viewed as art by another. All we can hope to be are art-attempters.
As I ran past Steven’s Park Golf Course in the early morning, a group of young children were chipping balls on the practice green and presumably getting ready to begin a day of golf camp. Their shirts, without exception, were the brightest fluorescents that I could imagine, and my lens-less eyes were dazzled by these fuzzy, frenetic spots of ultra-color that hacked away at golf balls with clubs half their height. And I had to wonder; were they just afraid of getting lost?
I walked through the Bishop Arts District this morning, the streets finally quiet after a night of Bastille Day reverie. French flags still droop slackly on their poles while a paper cup skates across the street like a weed. A woman in jogging clothes steps out of a cafe. Her Americano is steaming, even in the early morning mugginess of the Texas summer. If the street is remains barricaded the barriers are now invisible.
I’m sitting in my second favorite neighborhood coffee shop. A man in a full wool suit walks in the door and sits at the bar. I’ve seen him here before, he’s a regular here. His battered suede shoes belie his young face. Even in the early morning glare his face still carries the creases of a late night. His pocket square is a handkerchief. It looks like he’s reading Balzac, though it’s hard to tell from this distance.
justin@justinchildress.co
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