The blonde hair clings to the finger like a struggling inch worm. Beneath, an abyss that opens to ingest the tenuous hair. Strands and bands that mark the time of life and change. Why stand and allow the morphing world to surround me then become like air that I can take in and release, leaving a memory that changes with each moment. The first time means this, then the next time means not this, but something slightly different that accommodates my state and presses my thoughts in a direction, not necessarily the one I desire, but the one that is necessary and is forced by the direction of my thoughts. Each thought is like a track that bends and proceeds to point out a new destination, a path that winds and waves to a point that could very easily have been the terminus for a straight line. However, the surroundings have forced my thoughts to meander and trace a complicated form that has a complex three-dimensional topology using only the loose one dimensional trail of my thoughts.
A cave comes into view at the corner of my eye to pull me to the chasm and create a directionality for my intent and curiosity. I open up by closing in to the dark interior of a space I don’t quite know, but I learn it with each second I sit and experience the cave. The edges of the opening are subtly lit with the surrounding lighting, but with each step inward, it gets darker and darker. The darkness creates a passage within myself, where the lack of vision allows me to quiet my mind which makes me want to find out more about some part of me. What part of me? Why here? I cannot wander through the imagery and meanings of things around me in response to being affronted by them. There is nothing. Only what I touch and feel, only my heartbeat, only what I bring in with me.
What is in there is a rich, complicated world, like a separate realm that has a relationship to the outside through the interpretation and filtering of my mind. What do we construct? We make something that is based at least partially on reality, but it is our mind that is the lens that lets us see something new or some different meaning to that which is mundane in the outside. We take the object or idea, put it through gymnastics, associate it with something that shares some similarities to create another, an other. What is this novel thing that has appeared. We need to create a meaning, because a meaning ensures that it is real and it exists. Then, this meaning is the definition, not just a definition, which makes it more immutable. In order to let this meaning grow and change, we need to go through the same process again. We need to turn it, examine it, and find some angle that allows us to extrapolate on the nature of the object, then with a transformation, the object becomes something else. Again, this something else may not have a common description or meaning, so we need to develop it. Cycles of these changes allow something that is mundane to become extraordinary.
Can we do this a game? Create a process that makes something simple into something much more imaginative and complex? Yes, there are others that have explored this, and some use it to entertain–improvisation is very much like this, and really, maybe our entire being is a great improvisation. Can we learn from improvisation? What else? Well, improvisation gives us Yes, And. We need to research other possibilities and methods that improvisational actors and artists use to get what they need to produce meaning and interest.
This is interesting. What else is in this space to explore in the darkness and the quiet? Memories and desire are likely. The past and the future.
Past : Memory :: Present : Meaning :: Future : Desire