I’ve got an assignment due tomorrow (today, technically) for my Art & Design workshop, and as usual I put it off until a few hours before I have to hand it in. I’m working on it right now. The project is entitled “It’s about time” and here are a few lines from the prompt:
”Any narrative is based upon the idea that objects, environments and circumstances all change as they exist through time. Time is a tricky thing to describe in visual terms, but artists have devised countless ways to do so over the centuries … for this project, you may use the spatial or temporal medium of your choice. You may work in a representational, abstract or non-objective mode.”
Juan is one of the most incredible human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. His blog is usually a lot of great funny and a lot of great art, but here is a beautiful, thought-provoking, emotionally taut yet cathartic piece of writing.
The thing about life that dissatisfies me that most is that the human brain comprehends time in a singularly linear way. I mean really, it’s completely unfair that when I meet a person I can only know them from that point onward. It should be possible that when you have intimate knowledge of the molecular alignment of a person, their entire timeline unfolds before you. I want to know every way the people I love have ever been. Loving a fellow human being is simultaneously mourning every second of them lost to you by the rigid forward-moving construct of the human experience. Maybe I’ll take up meditation in an attempt to collapse the part of my brain keeping me from that. If Heaven were a thing, I’d like to imagine it as total immersion into the honest being of those you love and adore most. A humming buzzing essence.
Let me sink into your dreams, let me wrap myself up in your consciousness, let me being anything at all other than myself. No amount of screaming, crying, bleeding, eating, sleeping, will ever free me from the binds of self. I am sick of my organs. I am sick of my skin. Break me open like some hot, bloody fortune cookie, I want to drip down your walls and stain your floors with the rot that is my brain, my mind, my conscious, my id, my ego, my words that will never be good enough, with me.
