Bigger

This morning Sarah's first appointment was cancelled. So she awoke late. Because Sarah is my alarm clock I assumed that it was a ridiculous hour like 7am. But it was actually about 8:30 am. In the shower I had a bloody nose. I had fun with it since the red blood is usually a big problem when it has something to stain but in the shower it is just a colored substance, a play-thing, the play-thing that provides life to me, draining out, and around me diluting quickly into the vast flow of clear empty water that overwhelms it.

I made a cup of iced coffee after Sarah had left. First I placed the cream and sugar into the cup. Then I placed the coffee in. I stirred it together in a quickly mixing vortex changing the dark and light colors into a muted coffee brown. I then added the clear ice from the freezer and because the ice tray was empty I filled it with clear water from the sink. I also refilled the humidifier with water because it also seemed thirsty. I was obsessing about liquids - red, brown, clear, empty, filling, leaking, and full.

So at about 9:30 I looked out the window after getting dressed for the day, realizing that I hadn't taken the garbage out last night, and looked at the big pile of garbage still in front on St. Paul Street. Figuring that one big pile of garbage was better than two I decided to take down my stinking coffee ground littered garbage to the street. So I gathered my shoes and more importantly as much garbage as I could carry with me.

Sarah and I actually generate enough garbage each week that I can't actually carry it all. In this case I had the stinkiest garbage with me. It included things like stuffing that waited so long to get eaten on the stove that it smelled like old shoes. So I lugged the garbage down the back stairs to find that the garbage truck had already arrived. So I picked-up the pace and brought my two fists full of garbage to the two garbage disposal personnel. They looked at me and I asked their approval to place the garbage into the back of the truck. My garbage bags are white. Everyone elses are black. I gave the first set of bags a heave and scored them right into the heart of the garbage eating beast. Then I gave another toss and my white garbage bags mixed with the black ones in the truck temporarily populating the truck mainly with white garbage. Then the garbage man hit the secret lever and the garbage truck swallowed and crushed my garbage. I went back upstairs to get the second load of garbage but didn't have the will to chase the truck another block.

Sarah and I rewatched Blow-Up last night. This time we turned on the commentary and watched it the whole way through. I think it is helpful to listen to commentary when watching a movie that is abstract. Blow-Up is supposed to be about the idea of abstract art. It references ideas of what is art like when the main character buys a propellor and the reason why he buys it is that the propeller is "useless". According to Kant an object of art has no other useful purpose. I guess I am at peace with that definition. It does help to separate the art in the world from the engineering. While you can call some engineering efforts works of art they do have clear purpose and they do need to be separated from things like paintings, sculpture, photographs, movies, and creative writing. Blow-up also goes deep into the exploration of how to examine purpose and narrative in life. The actual narrative of life is imposed by people upon reality.

Individuals have their own reality that they can keep, like the reality that the photographer experiences when he finds in his photographs that he has found a murder. But without a group that can agree upon this reality and this narrative it isn't a confirmed and shared reality. So when the photographer loses his photographs and can't show anyone what he has seen then he can't transfer this narrative of truth to others to create a shared commitment of reality. This commitment to reality between groups and societies is arbitrary and doesn't need to be based upon truth so much as it needs to be based upon shared belief. So an entire society can believe in things like a religious god, that a certain star is sexy, that an enemy is an evil criminal, or that a race of people is the cause of personal suffering. So some type of reality and truth is the imposed will of truth that society imposes upon people and people accede to and not the objective verifiable facts of science.

Meaning in abstract forms can be either personal or agreed upon in a group. The abstract artist who paints like Jackson Pollack states that he is unable to understand the meaning of his paintings until much later. He imposes the meaning after he creates the abstract work. He finds a leg and then a dancer out of the chaos of the art that he created. Maybe it was always there in his subconscious mind. I don't really paint. I wish I did. I write and take photographs. Sometimes I write about things that don't seem to matter at all. They are just elements of life or just bits and pieces. Most of the writing is useless and some of it while entirely concrete facts about life is abstract. I look for a narrative to life but rationally I know that the only narrative to my life that exists is the one that I impose upon it or one that a friend, peer, co-worker, reader, viewer, or fan of it creates for themselves. No great author or cinematographer is stiching it together. In that way it is as abstract as a splattered painting by Pollack and it will take a person or group of people to look back at it and make sense of it. Maybe my life can be art, but only if it is useless?

Last night as I was dreaming I was at a concert with my parents and their friends. People were eating some paste like substance that looked somewhat like Hummos but was clearly sweet. I ate some as I found from them that it had been made from Peyote. It was in a dream and doing hallucinagens in a dream is an odd experience since a dream is no more than a hallucination to begin with. I finally found myself windsurfing and needing to learn how to handle pointing my boat in the right direction to reach the destination of a boat where my family was. The windsurfer caught a fast breeze and flipped over. It was sinking fast with me attached to it flowing down to the bottom of the body of water. I could see my mother frightened and trying to dive down to save me. But I was drowning and the only way out was to awaken. When I did.... I had forgotten to take out the garbage.