Snippet

“Did you love him?”
“Maybe,” I admitted, sipping on my can of orange Fanta. “I don’t think it was any of his business what I felt for him.”
“Unrequited, then.”
“No. Just the selfish love of a child,” I said, thinking of jelly-sticky fingers and broken toys. “You don’t want to give up the dream you created but you know it’s just make-believe anyways. At least that’s how I felt. I didn’t even like him, but he buried himself deep under my skin.”

“Do you still think of him?”
“Sometimes. It’s nothing that I actively try to do. But yes.” I hesitate, trying to put the words more clearly, “It’s like a book you almost started years ago, maybe read only a handful of pages – but you misplace the book or loaned it out and never got it back. It’s not that I’m missing closure it’s just I never had anything to close.”
“What was he like?”
“A teenage loser, just like all teenagers are, too egotistical. I was the worst. But he, he listened to alternative punk music and wore shirts with sarcastic sayings on them. He was a creature defined by his environment – a rebel in a poor suburbia. I think at that age we’re all looking for a kick, a way to get high. I think he did drugs: pot, coke, LSD, maybe E. I found my highs through him and in beating the crap out of people in kickboxing. I was the only girl in kickboxing – like I said we’re all too wrapped up in our own narcissism at that age. We didn’t really talk actually even though we were neighbors, but the one thing I remember was that he sat in front of me in English. Sometimes, I think he went to rehab for a month or so.”

“So, that’s your first love?”
“Yeah…probably. What was your original question again?”

Hello world! Defining my space.

I decided to join the rest of the world’s population and get my own blog. Carving my space and setting up real estate in the internet so to speak. I’d thought I’d do this with an introduction of sorts.

“We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.”
— Laozi

This quote smartly embodies our desire to capture the interval in both active and non-active spaces – an interesting phenomena that the Japanese painting philosophy of ‘Ma’ embodies. To better conceptualize the the tension in the in-between moments of activity, think of a dramatic pause in spoken lines of a play or in the visually ‘empty’ spaces of a painting that if they weren’t there would render a painitng impotent. That’s the non-being Lao Zi or Lao-Tsu speaks about, the space in-between.

My fascination comes in the very definition of space.

What can be said in a gaze? It’s an interesting question, but one artists and certainly cinematographers have struggled with. There’s a literally indescribable quality to certain moments in life, moments that can only be experienced or related through visual means. There’s a tension in these moments that buzz – that capture our attention, that can welcome or exclude.

In-between spaces are fraught with what life is about. It’s that unspoken quality, that undefined aspect of those moments that make life more than the categories we define it as. 

Space is something we can not define. The universe (or universes/realities) in which we exist is too vast for us to possibly try. Yet we insist on doing it anyways. We’re part of the Milky Way gallaxy, we live on earth, we claim countries with flags, and homes with deeds. We define our spaces with furniture, ourselves with clothes. Then, we try to define our minds.

We categorize our thoughts – give our philosophy into schools and then debate and deconstruct until post-modernist thought came and broke everthing. However, we still try to contain our thoughts into categories. But why? Is it to give form or label to something as intangiable as a thought? I think so. 

We try to define our inner world as we define our outer world. By giving non-being or the intanigable a container (real or not) in which we can keep them in.

I suppose it gives new credence to the idea that the mind is like a cup – and the only way to fill ourselves with more knowledge is to empty our cup first.

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(Potential is possibly the best word to use when talking about the in-between spaces or the moments of non-being. It comes from the late 14th century, and had the curious meaning of “possible, as opposed to actual”. It gained it’s current meaning of “that which is possible or has the aptitude to be possible” in the 19th century. This difference is slight but telling.  Early language made seperation between the possible and the actual as if they were two defined spaces or things.  While current use has potential as something that has the ability to become something more – it’s in a state where energy is stored within a system or has the potential to be more. Personally, I’m not sure if I like this, because it creates a hierachy of desireability as if the goal here is to be activated. However, it does stress that inherent tension if something will or will not change or transform. I could talk more about how this relates to painting and might one day but I’d rather not today.)