Reset

I dreamt that I lied to a friend-acquaintance about some relationships or relational dynamics, personal history, I said I had been with someone who I hadn’t not on purpose but by simply not intervening to say—that is not what happened, something else happened—to instead watch the narrative she had corded onto play out in her dialogue, kept from swerving it back the way of mine. In the end, I found that few in our circle were listening to me anyhow and in order to change that I had to circle back to her and tell her the real story, in other words, the truth of some affairs, even as they were trivial, not even to save my reputation (for the falsehoods could be spread, checked out) but to deepen our amity. 

Morris' bird

Among the many birds that Morris Graves painted, here is this one: Bird Singing in the Moonlight  (1938-9) from MoMA's collection, tempera and watercolor on mulberry paper. Look at its quiet cry. See also, this song.

MIRACLES

 

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the best questions are the ones that have no answers. There are the practical questions that can be answered through actions, such as what I pose to a painting: what do you need now? Or, what is being asked of me to bring you into realization? But the more base, more atavistic and innate knowledge concerns a not-knowing of the irremediable. 

Video I forgot I liked

 

capacity and void

Yesterday I went to David Zwirner to see the Richter show, which was full of dogs...Today I am thinking about...

Desire for connection is a funny pulsating thing that presumes void where one might generally hope to find capacity. In her classic treatise Gravity & Grace, Simone Weil writes:

We must not seek the void, for it would be tempting God if we counted on supernatural bread to fill it. We must not run away from it either.

The void is the supreme fullness, but man is not permitted to know it. What is permission to know? If knowing is determined by desiring awareness—the denial of permission to know is a voiding of that desire. 

Simone, a little bit earlier: We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object.

If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

Or, to extrapolate something I said to a friend recently, I feel freer now from many kinds of interactions where I was desiring something that was not there, that was unreal, and the desire was causing my soul to undergo a deep, miserable wrenching. Now, however, I can gingerly inhabit the supreme fullness of the void-conscious frequency, and I am so happy and grateful to be here that any connection that comes must be comfortable holding its own within this space, a space not of expecting supernatural magnetism, but of openness to and hunger for it. 

Such a hunger is not about "wanting" in lack but service in roominess, it is about making room for breath and for what might travel to me through it. Void-conscious experience creates a framework for new pulsations directed towards what on your frequency is unknown, as well as appreciation for who is there already.

relinquishment

It's been a challenge today to concretize very much in language. Simple articulation feels full of mistakenness. Interesting how that coincides with an acceptance of fallibility at the energetic level and an acknowledgment that there is no wrongness in being...even making mistakes does not convert your essence into "wrong". I was very attached as a child to a certain degree of perfectionism and fear of being wrong such that I would deliberately perpetuate behaviors from which I was consciously moving away because making a change would invalidate the past behaviors as wrong—a weaving of learning and unlearning that does not get one too far. It is amazing how much in the last couple months I have relinquished of that pattern, of the tension in my day to day, the frustrations with "inability to do", and how much that relinquishment owes to surrender and thus forth, creation.