I think that we create with whatever media are available to us. That is what makes us … not human, really, because there are all sorts of instances of various plants, animals, minerals creating with their available media.
So, maybe, that is what makes us … existential collaborators.
Stunning ceramics.
Mind-boggling hyperrealist painters.
Ultra-cubist and reductionist art slayers who create in ways that make us feel utterly guttural.
Nosing one’s shoe in whatever space/time one happens to find oneself.
My first visual playground, truly, was in the darkroom; melding chemicals and exposures to yield evanescent visuals. So you can see how creating bizarro imagery via software might sing to me.
I have been feeling incredibly disconnected from the small forms of organization and control that I had implemented over the last few years. Remember that post I wrote about the calming and soothing presence of to-do lists?
Trash.
I mean, it wasn’t trash then, and it definitely served its purpose for a cool three years — specifically, when I was in the throes of a deep physical, emotional, and mental transition that was made all the worse by being preyed upon by a virulent narcissist — and I am deeply grateful for it.
But I think that all of that work, all of that deep excavation wrought in part by the keening realization — subconsciously, to be sure — that I was continuing to engage in patterns of behavior that would only destroy me … I think it all came to a moment of such silence that I could finally, inexorably, hear myself.
There is some sadness when I think back to those hungry nights on 105th and Dayton, smoking pot in the basement apartment, developing bastet75 as Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy or PJ Harvey’s Dry reverberated through the Logitech speakers, using a pen pad to draw, in Fractal Design Painter, my logos and page headings and iconography. The end of every page was my handwritten signature:
In those days, the late 1990s — an era which Doctorow refers to as The Good Old Internet — there seemed so much fire and joy and love and hope and and and …
I mistakenly thought that I was listening to myself during that time, but, in retrospect, I was still keening to be understood. To be loved. The vast, spatial void of the internet at that time was a safe place to post up, tell a few stories, and stay awhile. But I was still utterly desperate for connection.
A few decades later, in this balmy office on Owana, with cracking cream paint and photos of Prince performing in his chonies in Detroit in 1980 soothing me, I can feel the difference. I had come from a decade of penpals, of writing letters and postcards to those I met on my travels, and a post along that superhighway felt comforting and hopeful.
But now I know that the person I am writing to is myself, and that is a treasure.
