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 art......these things that have happened to me, things I have done, things I am, or things that belong in the story of my life, but they are the ones I am choosing to tell, and how.  

The moments that I feel most strongly about, I consider holy.  Sacred. Set-apart.  And thus, the images. Translations, encodings, meant to obfuscate as much as illuminate.  Paintings, drawings, photographs, through process and mediation, drained of specificity, abstracted, mythologized, reaching towards transcending the personal and joining the great cosmic soup of universal onism. 

With the advent of social media, this setting-apart of special moments into the no-space of "the internet" becomes ubiquitous, in an affluent society...which makes sense, considering that perhaps the only anthropological constant is, somewhat bafflingly, a sense of the sacred, often paradoxically expressed as the ornamentation and adornment of the individual.  

In a broader analysis, I have been really finding meaning, in the wake of my mother's death, in the minute moments that are not set apart from, but rather integrated with the whole scope of my experience; the entire network of associations, feelings, memory and specific packets of information that constitute the nebulous constellation or things that is "me" or "my life".

A spotted little dog with his snaggle tooth looking at me with adoration and love.  The yellow-gold color of late September light on water, and the simultaneous sensing of both warmth and chill.  The children screaming and playing outside the window, confirming my bias against having any.  The sleepy-tired feeling in the afternoon, today, right now, and the sleepy-tired feeling in the afternoon when I was six, after playing in the yard at school.  Country music, rock and roll, and the smell of gasoline.  The culture of corn syrup; the subtle integration of cheekbones and foreheads of the Native American gene pool that was supposedly erased into the the pale faces and blond hair of American; the industrial architecture of the interstate highway system, the temples of consumerism like Costco that represent, again paradoxically, both safety + abundance, and the thralldom of living on "credit".

God bless us, every one.