Origin Stories, The Empire of Stuff, and the Light of Consciousness...

   July 14th, 2026

     I've always been fascinated by origen stories.  I think that as you get into middle-age and start to grapple more with mortality, especially once people close to you actually start to die, the more you tend to want to know the meaning of the things...Gauguin's famous "Who are we?  Where did we come from?  Where are we going?".  

My apartment is torn up this morning. The water heater is out, and in order to access and troubleshoot it, we had to move all my stuff off the big metal shelving unit in my storage room to be able to slide it out of the way.  So many tools!  Objects of our objects...how did Theroux put it...?  "Man has become a tool of his tools"...The Universe is a Thing that Makes...

The Object of The Object, mixed media on maple ply, 2010

    I've been building and making things, without stopping, almost every day since I was a little kid.  I have made a living and a life from the process, and there is a familiar rubric that gets shifted into overdrive when you are settling someone's estate--the physical remainder of a spirit, of a life force--and which I feel provides a sort of monumental insight into the nature and rhythm of consciousness, among other things.  It could be described at the Discursive-Evaluative mode of consciousness, and it is a very distinct end of what I believe is a spectrum of consciousness, at which other terminus lies what might be considered the Transcendent, or Sub-consciousness, or God-consciousness, or some other similar thing.  And, as we all instinctively understand, and comes to bear in very concrete ways, this spectrum is in reality a ring, a loop, an ouroboros, with each opposite again shading into the other, by degrees.  So, at the discursive-Evaluative Moment, we have our evaluative moment.  We identify something as a discreet thing, seperable from its surrounding stuff, and we hold it up, literally and figuratively, and examine it, and ask: 'What is this?  What does it do? What is it worth?  and to Whom?  And how shall I connect them to this?'  A hundred million times.  The Empire of Stuff, I've come to think of it.  It is incredible, the amount of things a modern human accumulates.  The other end of the spectrum of consciousness can be summed up by the phrase "All Things Are One Thing."

    When I was cleaning out my mom's property, I heard the ghost (s) of all my ancestors whispering, coaxing, dancing through the static on the edge of my present light of attention that I would be bringing to bear on an old microwave, or giant roll of bread-bag-tying wire, or a giant box of first-grade Art Projects, or collection of Winter-jackets, a Sheet-metal-press, a tub of glaziers putty, a box of Dungeons & Dragons miniature pewter fantasy figurines, and on and on.  And, for each object, you have to sort-through each of the voices in a similar way; whose voice is this?  Do I respect and admire them?  Do they have my best interest at heart?  Does their idea of the Good and the Right way to live, align with my own?  Should I now become a Glazier/Sheet Metal Worker/Microwave Owner/Dungeons and Dragons Player/person to whom this object and its function has an optimized value?  Nostalgia and mythology weave and blend into economics and procedural chores in a startling way, and there is always a sense of investigation.  It was like some mystery was afoot, and I must be careful not to trample over the potential clues...but what even is the question?  What to make of my mothers life?  What meaning does our family have?  And I would realize, that when sorting through the past, you are questioning Life itself, and the mystery you are trying to solve is what should I do with Life itself? Where ought I to go? What ought I to make!  Mama, how do I do this thing called Life?

There is this part of the imagination that appears to be extremely important to us, as a species, and it is the purpose-sensing part.  Perhaps, the Meaning-feeling faculty of human cognition.  In myself, when I align to it, I feel somewhat similar to when I am watching a protagonist in some production deal with a tricky situation with prescience and ability and strong moral character.  It could perhaps be described as a mixture of pride and relief.  I'm rooting for myself to do what I am doing.  Making things gives me this feeling.  Doing challenging physical activities, like surfing, gives me this feeling.  I think it's sort-of what drives most people to do most of the things that they do.  We try to be be the type of people that do what they should do.  How do we build this model of a person that we are trying to life up to, and what systems are at-play in its production, and to what ends?  Those are very interesting questions.

Butterfly Coast, 2012-14

Mine has been a uniquely syncretic experience.  Since earliest childhood, I have been shuttling between and around world-views, cultures, families, roles, identities, religions, moralities, and sub-cultures.  I have used picture-making as a way to sort-through these swirling points-of-view, in a way.  And the process of sharing the pictures, as yet another meaning-making/identity-building strategy.  

"I am the type of person that..." 

Well, I am the type of person that had an Indian for a mother, for starters.  

And I miss her.

So it goes.

Time to make some more pictures.  I'll write more about the Indian Thing tomorrow.