Old Free Writing I Found

Note from author* the text below is from a free writing exercise I did during my 2nd year art college FMP. When I read it back it still felt really relevant to my practise, and even reminded me of things I had forgotten. I thought it would be useful to add to my notes and research around Manifesto. 

Old Free Writing I Found 

It’s hard to know what I should start with talking about. I don’t feel entirely conscious of what I want to say.

I thought I was doing a project about Annihilation, in a cosmic earth shattering way.  Everything I made felt condescending and cruel. The work felt like it was saying ‘I know more than you’, when really what I wanted to communicate was ‘I see you, and you see me: we see ourselves’. 

When I was looking over my slides with Siobhan and we stopped on a Kiarostami quote: 

‘Contemplating the cloudy sky and the massive trunk of a tree under a magical light is difficult when one is alone. Not being able to feel the pleasure of seeing a magnificent landscape with someone else is a form of torture. That is why I started taking photographs. I wanted somehow to eternalize those moments of passion and pain.’

Moments of passion and pain. Siobhan said, 

‘I think that’s what this project could be called, that’s what the project is about’. 

I was just like, gobsmacked like,

 ‘Oh my god, she’s so right.’

Immediately I thought of the films I write, and the films I love. There’s nothing special about that, maybe that’s what all art is about. Well, it’s what all the art that I like is about at least. 

I realise that I am not unique, and wonder why I bother with art at all when so many others have expressed and tried to express the very same thing. I feel very hungry. I don’t know, there is no justification.

Siobhan said that my work, and the work I gravitate towards, is fragile. There’s a sense of things changing very quickly, transience, insecurity. It felt like Siobhan could see right through me, I quite like that you can tell I’m insecure, anything else would be untrue. I looked back and realised lots of things do change very quickly in life. I felt seen. I wonder what is better being truly seen or truly seeing ? I think that’s all anyone is trying to do in life - really be seen. It’s hard. I think that is why people love art so much. 

I suppose I think about endings so much because I feel so used to them, and I’ve always been morbidly inclined. I really enjoy thinking about dying, not for any particular reason - it's just fascinating. With my OCD, I have to look at life differently. I have to release my attachment to living, otherwise I can’t get out of bed. I lie on my bed all the time, look out the window and think:

‘Look at all this. Look at me seeing, look at me thinking, look at me loving, look at me hating. Look how real it all is! And yet there will be a day, when I won’t have a head to remember any of this. When I won’t have a head to remember who I am. When there won’t be anyone else to remember who I was. All this struggle, all this pushing against what life seems to want to do. Just to pop out of it.’

I don’t think that with fear, I think it with awe. When you really stop and think about the existential horror knowing everything you love will die. But then that brings me to my next philosophy. Which is probably going to sound like it contradicts everything I’ve said thus far.

All there is is the now. You know that. There is no such thing as the future, it will never come, there will always be now. Nothing, more nothing less, just now. Right now, as far as I know, I am not dead - so to The Me Whose Right Now - I will never die. I try not to think about my life as linear. Looking at time in a linear way is helpful most of the time, it gets you places, you know when to go to bed. I see life differently, forever and now - mean the same thing to me. 

There are some forevers that are so strong and bright, you - I don’t even know what the right words are. It’s like that moment when you truly truly fall in love with another person, and the whole world stops. All of a sudden you just understand. Those forevers - they’re always with you.

Life is this confusing balance of science and spirit, of being and of not being. Of truth and alternate truth. Of knowing and believing. It’s all so confusing, how could I do anything other than try to understand it. Try to write about it, try to make peace with it. 

I always hate those spiritual gurus. I listen to them all the time, and feel like they’ve said nothing. It’s not because they’re full of shit, even though they very often are. It’s because telling someone something is the least effective way of communicating knowledge or the abstract. Which is why we tell stories - because the story is the experience. Through the shared experience, you can communicate. 

Which nicely brings me back to my college project lol. I could talk and talk and talk about this all day. But I’ve been struggling to find an artistic (visual) language to express it through. I feel comfortable with writing, which is why Siobhan suggested I write. I enjoy writing, even though it makes me feel a bit embarrassed. What I need to figure out is how I’m going to create a shared experience. I don’t know yet. Maybe I could write some more. Moments of passion and pain, that’s what I need to keep thinking about. Sounds like it’s probably time for a mind map.