Machine emotion

I've just had something of a breakthrough. First I'll explain the course of the evening, before it happened.

Today, as I was returning home from uni (my very last day - of this degree, at least) I felt particularly flat, drab, dull and emotionless. I'm not sure why. Sometimes the world surrounding me throws a heavy blanket over my moving body and weighs me down, and I'm never sure where it comes from. Usually it lasts for a while and then slowly begins to lift, or quickly whips itself up into the air, if I see a brilliant sky or something that distracts me - but this time it was unmoving, stubborn.

Not having eaten since breakfast, I walked home very hungry; having just smoked I had the taste of cigarette in my mouth, and for some reason I began to feel quite anxious and a little aggravated. A kind of anger began to push up against me, nudging like a cat against the side of my brain. It's quite often that I feel pressures building up like walls, suspended across parts of my plane of vision, they are difficult both to explain and to understand, I am knowingly unfamiliar with their recurrence, if that makes sense. Maybe I'll write more about these 'pressures' in the future - it's something personal and something I seldom talk about.

Anyway, when I arrived home I was markedly irritable, and irritable at that, that I couldn't know why. Relaxing and lightening up were ideas that were simply, honestly, not available. I wanted to be cocooned, under the ground and away from light or up in heavy clouds that would rumble and disguise me, to morph into a fluid so I could slip into other objects and vacate my existence, for a while.

I am not an angry person, but now I felt like a weird, unsettled child, ready to throw a tantrum, ready to grind myself into the floor and cry - except I didn't know whether crying would do - it was more like a confused, heavy fire surging inside that took on a melancholic weight as it grew in anger and momentum.

Usually these are times when something else completely takes control and you end up submitting to forces outside of yourself; emotions take reign and lead you to places regardless of whether you want to follow; you become an agent of feeling, a conduit. And so this emotional surge bubbled up in spheres that rose inside me and the next few moments saw me move towards the piano. For the piano, arms extending, not intending for fingers to touch keys, shuffling wanting touch heavy wooden glide to embrace keys inside that have sound in them, oh this compulsion drawing me in and I sit on the stool and begin to play D, D, D -- D, with my left hand then a chord with my right, then notes growing up from the piano sprouting out like leaves dripping silver into soft harmonic interplay and I slide down from the stool to the floor while my hands remained atop the keys, and now I am on the floor, and now I close my eyes to find this dark recess , behind the wall of the upright piano, I am away from the world, my hands are still in the world, my ears are somewhere in between and I am away from the world and the sound connects us,

- and that's when I really play, I see pictures and move freely over notes, between chords light and heavy are columns of an old villa with grass in between - I'm in the water, eyes shut and I'm paddling and on the floor in this room I'm pedalling still with my right foot as I crouch and curl and let my hands find the sounds that string out like flesh across the darkness, lights that slide and slip over my eyelids reflect off the sound that reflects off the light in the view of this landscape while I sit protected behind this giant heavy barricade machine.

Honestly, this was the hugest freedom I've felt in a long while. Not being able to see the notes gave rise to an unimaginably vast landscape of sound, I am engulfed, surrounded by sound, no longer restrained by my eye's knowledge of the piano keyboard at all, free to open up and flower out trusting ears and feelings alone.


I went on like that for hours. It was like sleeping.


This has been incredible. The aftermath of this is still resonating inside me, a new self introduction, and I'll be glad to see anger again if there's a piano around.

On the drawing

So, I promised to write about my aartwork. (I think a double ‘a’ suits - makes it sound less pretentious... and more Scandinavian)

Well... for starters, I do have quite a volatile relationship with my pencil and paper. The ideas are always with me, brewing at their own will. I am quiet until the ideas erupt like volcanic matter rushing up and streaming out like hot and cool at the same time, so whether pencil and paper are abused or nurtured, really depends on the mood of the idea. Recently, it's been a slow and sleepy affair, ruled by pattern and with something of a grace – like sitting at a lake, cool and placid, tapping now and again on its surface in hope of rousing the attention of the giant creature that lies beneath to come out the paper and grab me and pull me in. Only sometimes it does, and the relationship is volatile and rocky as it is stable and captivating, at times compelling as a very painful migraine pounding in masses of headache in tight pulses that draws you to focus on the pain by way of something like pressure therapy, because at the same time as labourious it is soothing and cooling like external seraphic rain on the skin of your face. But that’s only at the best of the best of times that’s when you feel it right through; I will go at it for hours without the slightest sense of discomfort in my 4-hour-awkwardly-stationed posture, dot after dot and line after line. The better times are when I can sit and track the creature’s swim and have a pencil or paintbrush move right in time, and when you have the enduring sensation of pins and needles like irritating rainshower coming to be but never quite refreshing … the other times leave me with landscapes of a lake and no creatures to be seen, and no rain, either.

But the best thing about drawing (versus painting, for example) is that you can have the simplest conditions – pencil meets paper, stand back and let your hand do the work while your body flips back into a recess behind it where your mind can melt and mold into dreamy pounds of imagined figures that come to play on the page and you’re never knowing, you’re always the audience, laying back in comfort and ease because you’ve forgotten about yourself. And so instead of being conscious of developing a style, and as I am pretty sure there’s much opportunity for different themes and phases, for me the greatest way to stylistic consequence is just to relax let creativity roll over me, and to find style by not trying to get it. That said, by a kind of irony it actually does sometimes take substantial efforts to be passive, as we’re not trained to act subconsciously. So then it can’t be got by trying not to get it, and hence the booze-induced or pot fuelled expression of quite a few people I know – and by quite a few people I include, occasionally, myself… but for the most part I do it soberly.

Well anyhow, it is honest – in fact somehow it feels like one thing I do most honestly… Talking and writing take more conscious efforts and so come out a little more coloured by motive and by wishes and desire; making music is still at a stage where it happens before becoming a symptom of the thought – when it does work it is always a result of a mental or emotional process and purely that, but sometimes it’s barred by my fingers’ inability to deliver.

And with all of that said I ‘m actually not happy with any of my drawings and if you ask me, all of them still need to be improved. What’s good about the process though is that I can see a way opening up to me, I’m getting to know the person I’m creatively becoming more each day and still so strangely as if passive, passive to her control. I may have mentioned in my last blog, that I feel much of the time as though I’m following myself, there’s always an energy taking lead that comes close toward me and pulls me toward it whether I’m moving or still. It could be part of what makes people believe in god (or *the force* – I reckon Star Wars has it down), or it might be a manifest idea of the alter-ego you are tracking and trying to meet, or even just its ghost. But this seems to be something people refer to when they speak of the Divine, of beautiful enchantment, tenuous threads of rapture or orgasmic revelation. And it is what artists seek. It can feel as a content or subtle euphoria, a unique kind of attainment as you’ve been its sole creator, mover and maker, that results in a certain agreement with the world. And so there is a wave that comes over you which casts invented scents and colours you’ve never seen; the world is more lucid and growingly magical as if it’s in love with you, and you can just breathe it in as freely as ever; yet, it is brief and fleeting, liminal and transitory, and it never holds for long enough.

David Lynch speaks about using the interesting unique method of transcendental meditation to induce ideas out of their base state and thus achieve them – and though his films may seem unnecessarily twisted and surreal, the point is that he has baited his skill to bring out the real stuff from under his conscious currents for us to have, to watch, almost to hold in our hands and to smell, see and taste (anyone who’s seen Eraserhead will know what I mean). The trick is to nurture and grow the systems around you, both personal and peripheral, and let them be simple mediums – and at the base of this keep a meditation which by its stillness, transcends the reality teeming around you in a fluffy buzz of ideas and thoughts, and lets you be grounded, wholly and silently.

So, with that in mind, my current project involves working on my painting method. This is certainly not a sleepy, gracefully passive, or unconscious process– no, it’s bloody hard work. So as long as I keep learning, hopefully it will eventually reach a similar stage to my drawing, where I can let it be more natural, and more efficient, than it is now.

...Well, that’s it for today - I now have to somehow magically whip up a 2,500 word research assignment for uni, due on Monday. I was up till 3am making pictures with pastels and crayons (I’m loving the crayon these days). Anyway, I might write about the essay later, here… though it’s not likely as I’ll be completely over it afterwards.

Vi ses senere!

Preconsciously

After a pretty long lull, it has come back. The fulcrum, the spirit, my working method; the driven pulses of creative desire.

Often I'm confused by my own compliance to certain motives, but there are those more ghostly than others who skim swiftly past and give you a yes, or a no, and they are the ones I listen to.

To be clear, I am not religious - not even vaguely. Nor am I wontedly spiritual. There is no progression or permanency of belief about this. What I'm talking about is something very gentle, a subtle key that links itself to my life, latches into my emotions and thoughts; and only when I am aware of it, releases them - and this is what grounds my creativity. Spirit is something that grows with you naturally, and is released naturally - the important thing is to recognise it.

Though Freud coined the idea, I think the preconscious is a beautiful term, and one that describes this quite well. As a semi-permeable membrane between two worlds, it contains the elements of the subconscious at the same time as allowing the consciousness their possession.

But to bring this concept into the framework of artistic endeavour, I think, is most powerful. Here is the way we live. First comes living, doing, acting; day-time, conscious and normal behaviour. Then there is the sleeping, resting, dreaming; night-time subconscious or semi-conscious behaviour. Where I want my artwork and music to grow, is in between these two places: in the preconscious. Making music, for me and at least for this stage in time, has to come from this place. To slip and slide between aware and unaware, drawing from me with an unrelenting dynamic to clasp at the pieces of gentle glimmering beauty and string them out for me to play. It has to be fluid and honest, and to permit vulnerability. To be truthful. Such creativity is by nature a spiritual expression of something subconscious, facilitated by a consciousness.

Much of the time, improvisation means to musically articulate something that is close to a mental process but that cannot be articulated verbally, or expressed any other way than by such a spasmodic act - as if involuntary. And so it feels as a submission sometimes to something much more important, a despotic mistress knowing of everything who walks in the most beautiful and divine way, giant and elegant, always one step ahead. Or it's the case that an assembly of ideas will be forming, brewing away somewhere inside... and instead of having to reach in and draw them out, they are lifted up, easily, up and out on their own and at their own pace. Sometimes it is just the practice of taking pen to paper, in mindless simplicity. Either way, you are the vehicle and not the driver.

So now, in order for this to be at its best and for my expression to be most true and most pure, I just need to wait, to listen, and to follow.

Working

its swift and quick rumble bubbles comfort for a while
and stirs in through flesh light food

listening food

to hear the ready to fight yawn of a hostage
behind melancholy, stubbing courage down to a blunt lumped mass

which, if i watchfully allow,
slowly piles up over itself
and figures into a clay -

- all the bells ring out to the tips of my fingers scribbling to find pattern in air and clutching in strings for pieces
to play with, to caress the face,
smooth over the eyelids

and when the bells slow their toll

then, i'm reminded of the first rumbling bubbling rumble -


- this is the tumbling stone, cyclic in my working method
collecting mud, swelling with each lapse relay
over matter incarnate and incarnate

Up for standard image testing...

The last day of March. Suited, perhaps, to mark the end of the very march I've had enough of: the march, or perhaps conventional saunter, casual as ever like the dismal of Collins. More bluntly, I've had it with uni, work and everything else; and all that remains attractive - in fact beckoningly seductive - is my artwork. More about that later.

First, for the sake of this new blog, and to represent this attitude, is my impression of Lena, or 'Lenna', the Standard Test Image. Voilà:

For those who don't get the reference, there's more here. Now I can comfortably take my seat, at the foot of Irony, as I like it.

On that note, welcome to my new blog! And if you're interested in my other endeavours, check out my music page.

Enjoy!, if that's the right word.