Saturday, December 5, 2009

Exhortation now that we're older

Goal One: Learn to love structure or perhaps the destruction of it or perhaps knowledge of it to reconstruct it and make it new again. Resist the common urges of your synapses to wander and wiggle through the world of your brain stew. STRUCTURE STRUCTURE STRUCTURE IT. Not in a necessarily WMP-y kind of way or a bell curve or a Aristotelian tangle but enough to say exactly what you mean. Spill no more milk, tumble no more tunes from lips, button up. Will you be able to say in a year "Limitation inspires creativity" when you do not believe it now? Probably not (secretly you will still believe that you yourself already contain so many limitations that further limitations would only offer less and not more). Think about how rules that you could make up could be AWESOME. Is this subversion or is this acceptance of a rule-based, competition-driven, have/have-not societal mode? In a year, will the opposite be true and will you cycle back to where you are now?

Learn to interact with, face up to, acknowledge, and form opinions on
  • borders
  • edges of bodies
  • skin and cell membranes
  • tripartite religions and storylines and how every bullet pointed list must contain more than three bullet points
  • spacing in text
  • silence and noise (John Cage and his listless mumble)
  • line breaks
  • the place where exhaling ends and inhaling begins or the other way around
  • lines, queues, waiting
  • age
Goal Two: Ask yourself - "When the words come out and on to the page, why do they come out in a block?" or "Why do you like things that are parallel as opposed to perpendicular?" Really answer these questions.

Goal Three: Stop ignoring these questions. Stop ignoring structure. You must decide whether or not it is your friend. Prose is not the only model of living. But also, don't jolt awake when your dreams follow some semblance of reality, when there is story-line. Regard every impulse with suspicion. See if you can reformat not only your words but your very neurons.

basically
unlearn your functions
hop over here
and here
and over there
because
well
the thing is
there isn't enough time to stay the same.

2 comments:

  1. wow hmmn i like your thoughts

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  2. yeah this is super cool, i keep returning to it to think about how to engage with structure and un-learn it in order to possibly use it...
    the layering of visual and neural and psychological and creative kinds of structuring are exciting.
    it's funny though, i get hooked by the statement "form opinions on." to unlearn & actively engage with structure of days/papers/forms/writing/art do you have to take up some kind of position on everything....? i'm wondering how play and having fast (as in "hold fast") opinions fit together.

    just a thought of my head.
    i like seeing yr processing

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