on borders
there are a lot of artists I could mention but the ones I mention below are important to me, they were like the first people who I had ever seen work in the arts in a way that i was trying to work in the arts. obviously they have a big platform and I’m sure there are people I would relate to more than them, but for now they are who are coming to mind.
I can sit calmly while war wages in a country not to far from my own.
I can imagine bombs dropping and they look like dragon flies and a sand cloud in my mind.
My only physical memory of a bomb is from my childhood when they would test them at the nearby airforce base, the largest one in the US, and they would rattle the windows of my home.
I also had a bomb explode in my childhood home in a dream I had the other night, and everyone was on fire.
It is easy for me to imagine two realities existing at once, and it’s easy to go beyond that and imagine multiple realities existing, in unknowable quanities.
What does William Kentridge, Ai Weiwei and I have in common? I believe we all stand on the edge of borders between the have and the have nots, the borders of a system which benefits one population and innately ostracizes and commits systematic physical and psychological violence to others as a way to control and extract resources from the victims who are more easily manipulated… and those who understand what part of the system they are born in, who are privy to the abuse, learn ways to exist within it or try to find ways to leave it or play the system and ultimately become abusers themselves.
We all share unique perspectives and relationships with experiencing other people’s trauma while simultaneously metabolizing our own. We are empathetic, truth seeking, unapologetically descriptive in our experience of the world. We want to be helpful, and we want to be free.
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music is going to be played soon in the space where I’m writing, people are now tuning instruments and practice together. it is quiet and there aren’t many noises. there is a louder conversation going on in the other room. but for the most part people are still. I am safe and calm.
I am sure like WK an d AW we all share complex PTSD and I feel like everyone is at risk for those kind of experiences, I feel like I am safe right now. I used to think when I was younger, after so many funerals, I could die any day, I would have thoughts of a bullet going through my head almost every day at least once I would have a vision of it. Today I am safe, I don’t have those thoughts anymore and I think about the future often, I think about being alive more often than of being dead now… but it took time, it took several years, maybe about 8 years about it feels like.
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i’m going to go see some friends now and partner and maybe eat some oysters. it’s a beautiful day and I feel the air getting cooler (there was a breeze today that actually felt cold!). I made food that I typically have with my family during the end of the year and shared it with my colleagues. it was my uncles celebration of life today. and I felt a lot of love from those who are closest in my life. It’s wonderful how I can still witness and experience multiple things at the same time, that multiple things can exist at the same time, ongoing, past and future, I am grateful I can feel so much and express those feelings in the way that I do…. which I am still developing…. I’m grateful I still feel like a newbie to writing…. writing is difficult
i am still getting used to my new work schedule and finding time to write
work schedule atm is 4am-12:30 5 days a week (wake up at 3 take a nap at 1:30 sleep another 4 hours after nap) … today we got out early so I came out to write after and it’s currently 17:56…
also I refuse to use artificial intelligence in any of my art or writing. i don’t even like writing those two words together or even mentioning them in my work. but I will make it extremely clear right now that cancer will not be used here. and I speak so harshly about it because it can’t touch what I do or else their would be no reason for me to write or exist at all. my relationship with a. i. at the moment is that it is not affirmative to my nature, it wants things as the collective wants them, it wants to morph me into everyone else, and I wish to grow as I please, I feel it sucking nutrients from my stomach. I am scared of it. this is something which I hope changes, I don’t like not caring for something but I don’t find it helpful at all, I find it hurts me at the moment.
and it makes me feel more human when I use the wrong their/there* like I did above… and yes I noticed, and no I won’t change it, I was writing fast and with this burning feeling in my stomach and that is evidence of my humanity.
