Texture & Specificity
September 28th, 2023 Colfax, California. Colonial camp, railroad town. I've spent most of my life and creative energies in searching for order, meaning, harmony in abstraction: considering the implications of biology and neurology in social construction and broader cultural currents, expressions and institutions. Or, trying to understand the process by which history, personal or cultural, becomes drained of specificity, agglomerated, symbolized and thus transformed into myth. In many ways, this drive towards abstraction has been a defense mechanism against the confusion, terrors and pains the my specific difficult experiences and the aspects of my personality/life/family circumstances have engendered in me. Even as I write this, I am reluctant to give concrete examples. I tend to want to save them, be strategic, as I feel they can be quite shocking, or have other powerful effects....for example, to illicit jealousy.....pity....etc......how much to make one's story into a