(I wrote this then, and am just posting it now... It's the beginning of a thought thread, unfinished, but still whirling in the mind...)
So I'm writing just to write. Is that so wrong? Been having the sorts of time-losing conversations where the brain fires a million times a second and the ideas come so fast you can't remember the ride afterwards, but it sure was good. I guess I want to see if I can return to some of the tastier bits, or the ones I'm still chewing on, somewhere in my psychie...
There is a thought path I'm exploring about physical attraction, sexual drive, and human and animal needs that underlay this complex play. (Now is where I question the placement of this entry on this site, herforeto safely avoiding sex even when discussing gestation and fertility and the embrionic state, mainly for the metephor of dormant/invisable below-the-surface activity). Strangely it seems safer to talk about this aspect in terms of death than in terms of sex. It's not polite (or perhaps it simply finds you in bad company) to use the word on the internet. But what the hell.
These days I am lucky enough to consistently have a roof over my head and be free from most forms of physical danger. Many of us can say that the threats our animal bodies are poised to respond to are simply not current or immenent in our daily lives. Perhaps this frees us up to choose mates differently? (I should take a minute to say that in this post my perspective ecchos my reality: that is, it speaks to a 'straight' woman's perspective, narrow at best) So my thinking last week was about the difference between physical safety (as in powerful, as in having a lover who can beat off other agressors -the classic Alpha, or conversly, as in nurturing, having a lover who will nurse your wounds and care for you in weakness or illness) and emotional safety (having a lover who will hear -maybe even understand- your emotions, track your triggors and avoid at most costs further scarring of your psychie).
Maybe there are different kinds of threats, or maybe we are simply privilaged enough for these to be our worst? Statistics say frightening things - that one in four women are sexually molested by the age of 20? Perhaps feeling safe in such an intimate act, feeling safe during sex with your partner is a modern privalege? Is choosing a 'sensitive man' over an alpha not just a modern choice but also the mark of an evolved woman? And further- does it work? Are we programed -either through our animal makeup or our our experiential imprints- to be turned on by danger?
In a culture where masculinity has so long been defined by dominance, one has to wonder where will this dynamic get us?* Basically power, abuse... etc
*Obviously I will have to address, at another time, the issue of 'human' vs. 'animal', which comes up alot here. Worth consulting on these fronts are Daniel Quinn -Ishmael author, and Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild...
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Eric Francis' Latest
So I'm hoping to get around to writing a response to this latest column by Eric Francis sometime soon. His word choice or lead-ins can be awkward at first, but I think he's one of the deeper thinkers and more compelling writers of our time. He is a true seeker, trying to understand the self and the cosmos, with an understanding of relationships (personal, sexual, communal and environmental). He combines psychology, his M/O about personal evolution, his a career in astrology, with a radical sense of responsibility and grounded-ness. You can find him writing on politics, the environment, virtually anything in this world or the next.
Here, I particularly like what he says about claiming our right to our existence, (I know I feel like I'm always trying to earn my keep) and acknowledging the other side of life. Not just death, but non-existence. He talks about the need to be a hero as a sort of narcism and as motivated by our fear of death. Very interesting food for thought. More on this in another post. In the meantime, give it a read:
http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2009/5/Horoscopes/Unraveling-the-Mystery-of-Self-Esteem
Here, I particularly like what he says about claiming our right to our existence, (I know I feel like I'm always trying to earn my keep) and acknowledging the other side of life. Not just death, but non-existence. He talks about the need to be a hero as a sort of narcism and as motivated by our fear of death. Very interesting food for thought. More on this in another post. In the meantime, give it a read:
http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2009/5/Horoscopes/Unraveling-the-Mystery-of-Self-Esteem
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
under over across through
Across:
horizon line splits
Over & Under.
We are OF it,
stuck in the thin Between
stand here. travel there.
with eyes, mind
observe.
'stuck' courtesy of the illusions
Still & Separate
Particles,
defined by discrete boundaries
by separateness, and specific location
are the body of our earth mind
(they pretend at stillness, notice
difference, gravitate toward sameness)
But we came piped on the light highway
over and over forgetting this origin
THROUGH is the collision of time and space
through seeming solidity is wave motion
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Notes.... Exciting Art in Providence
This week marks the closing of two inspiring shows: "Knot", a three-part solo exhibition by artist Annabel Daou at The David Winton Bell Gallery (more from me to come on this show!), and "How to Hold On" constructed works by Jon Laustsen, at 5 Traverse. (5T is holding a closing party this Friday, March 13th, from 7-9 with DJ Timothy O'Keefe).
But not all is lost! Call me biased, but I am particularly psyched for the upcoming show in the Jewelry District, at 150 Chestnut Street. (Full disclosure: I will have work in this show)
One of the more unique things about this show is that it features *tons* of site-specific installations, many of which are interactive.
Learn more here: http://deconstruct2.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Riff on "The Seas Define Our Graves"
(quote: Erik Wohlgemuth)
by Natasha Maria Brooks-Sperduti
Water flows in constant motion. Energy waves course through me in waves of e-motion defining my environment, transforming me, lifting me tossing me, dragging me and placing me back down when they are through. I fear how constant they are. I fear their motion. I have no way to stop them, but I try, seeking stillness for solace. I have this idea that bodies are still and solid and that these qualities add up to “strong”. It is an antiquated idea. Never really true but in few cases, and always with a quieter rule of Flow balancing, governing, that 'truth'. But I know that I am made up more of water, motion, energy, salt and silt than hard or still or unchanging Anything. Maybe my ideas are like sediment. A slow cementing clogging up the experience of Now with notions of stillness.
Outside Marseilles I hiked the Mediterranean cliffs they call Cornishes. I looked out through the wind, my eyes spilling down the steep dry rock to the sea below. There was a narrow inlet where boats huddled against the coast, rocking gently, protected from wild motion of wind and water by the body of the earth. In that moment the boats were people or pups in a litter – huddled for warmth, for comfort and safety. Sea farer or not, humans are land-bound.
I spend a lot of time thinking about our strange in-betweenness. Our commonality, on one hand, with earth, mud, and stone. That we have bodies with boundaries; bone, muscle and skin. That we experience the world, in part, as Objects In Space. And I spend at least as much time thinking about what is also true: How much of our physical being is water. What water's properties are. How real our perceptions and projections and psychology are. That we have energetic realms that exceed our bodies, and they are the palpable power of emotion and consciousness, which travel in wave forms. How our experience, how WE are constantly changing. At times I feel more like light. Like I manifest at least as much as a wave as I do a particle. I exist (as do you) way outside the body as well as deep within it. I am both place and place-less-ness. I stand alone, And we are all one...
The Seas Define Our Graves.
How?
The Seas. They limit our boundaries of earth, where we live and die, the boundaries of our safe space, and do they perhaps also define what is to us unknowable, and therefore occupy the realm of our fear? If not unknowable than simply that with which we have not yet learned to identify: the fluid, and the invisible.
'The Seas' define what we are not or what we fear to admit, what we refuse to acknowledge, what we struggle against. Chaos, disorder, our utter lack of control.
Because they are deadly to us, creatures of the earth.
In that seas of emotions threaten life as we know it, provoking change, they threaten our beloved predictability, or perception of reality. Seas, emotions, wave-forms, and The Changing threaten the foundations on which we have built our ego, our story. Their existence threatens to obliterate such things.
If Sea brings death and Earth life then how do we account for the healing quality of water, or for our own 85% of our shared make up?
The Seas Define Our Graves.
Define is a nice word. To define is to limit, to mold or shape. Water defines the earth through erosion. Earth limits water with its banks and shores, its tightly-packed slow moving mass. But in the span of time, water slowly wins. We are defined by what we are not. And as we live out our years we learn more and more about What We Are Not. This is as much a relief as a heartache. I am freed to be what I am as I shrink into that shape by seeing the full large space of not-ness around me. And yet. This is a particulate notion. [there are others, as I've said, as i feel, as i hope to push the world to acknowledge.] It can be painful. The process of definition. There are always wounds, mistakes, struggles. 'De'. Is that a negative prefix? Fine. A smaller grit. More polished, more specific.
Erosion. I think of wind and water carving out canyons. Exposing layers of time. Earth and bodies becoming living histories of themselves. I think of rushing water grooving deep riverbeds down through our country. Refining and defining and re finding their path. Sometimes hopping the edge to forge new paths. Flooding planes and Having Their Way, reserving the right to re-route. I think of man pushing back with dams and bridges and reservoirs... River rocks get refined *really fine* till their surface is as smooth and reflective as the water which defined it. And I think finally of sand, the continuation of this process of constant motion. A toss-until-lost approach. Banging makes it softer, sort-of.
I think The Seas Define Our Graves is poignant because of the emotional connection between the sea and fear. Motion, that ultimate uncontrollable element, that element that comes with birth into this world of space. That which is unpredictable yet constant, and which rattles me, from inside out and outside in. Motion. CHANGE. We want it. We have it. We fear it. We fight it because we have no choice about it. And because in our desperate attempt to believe in our own power over nature we normalize The Constant. We act, in our minds, with our notions like Normal = Stillness, sameness. This is a creature comfort, a creature desire. We mistake stillness and sameness unchangingness for safety, and so we seek it, trusting only ourselves to initiate action. Feeling dominated and oppressed by other forces of power, other initiators of change. We seek what we know. What has come before. What is unchanging. But change is our only true constant. And being the flow we feel is a possibility, a choice, is not weak, but powerful. This sea of/we fear is not the enemy. In fact, it is our fear of change, our deep desire for consistency which buries us, limits us, causes our death.
Our Graves. In our graves is what we bury. What defines our graves is what buries us. The earth, the notion of stillness, the attachment to solidity, the perception of stillness and solidity, themselves an illusion or at best a temporality. We bury what we wish away - The dormant the subconscious the invisible the deniable the tugging but silent. The horror. The truth. Occasionally, we bury what we struggle to accept, once we have laid it down to rest, let go. We bury then as a way of putting it back. Into the pool. Into circulation. Out of this realm and into the next. With human death, we are given little choice. This is what is done. Graves are the last concrete, latitudinal longitudinal Earth-bound places of loss. They locate our grief on the body of this Earth. But we know that emotion such as this cannot be limited to place or in time. Emotion such as this is like we are, and bigger than we are.
The truth of death calls for a re-defining of the Self as wave form. Of the self as reflective of that oft-denied half of truth: The truth as changing, as existing in and outside of time, as being shapeless, formless, transparent and shifting...
The seas define our graves. They do. In that our fear of fluidity limits our conscious experience of existence. Our motion-related anxiety limits our evolution, limits our ability to see Truth.
Acknowledgment of FLUIDITY - it's power, it's beauty, it's essence, it's all-pervasive presence around and inside of us. Embracing it, learning to be it, championing it's wisdom, harnessing it's power, normalizing it. That is the next way that Truth will set us free.
by Natasha Maria Brooks-Sperduti
Water flows in constant motion. Energy waves course through me in waves of e-motion defining my environment, transforming me, lifting me tossing me, dragging me and placing me back down when they are through. I fear how constant they are. I fear their motion. I have no way to stop them, but I try, seeking stillness for solace. I have this idea that bodies are still and solid and that these qualities add up to “strong”. It is an antiquated idea. Never really true but in few cases, and always with a quieter rule of Flow balancing, governing, that 'truth'. But I know that I am made up more of water, motion, energy, salt and silt than hard or still or unchanging Anything. Maybe my ideas are like sediment. A slow cementing clogging up the experience of Now with notions of stillness.
-- -- --
Outside Marseilles I hiked the Mediterranean cliffs they call Cornishes. I looked out through the wind, my eyes spilling down the steep dry rock to the sea below. There was a narrow inlet where boats huddled against the coast, rocking gently, protected from wild motion of wind and water by the body of the earth. In that moment the boats were people or pups in a litter – huddled for warmth, for comfort and safety. Sea farer or not, humans are land-bound.
-- -- --
I spend a lot of time thinking about our strange in-betweenness. Our commonality, on one hand, with earth, mud, and stone. That we have bodies with boundaries; bone, muscle and skin. That we experience the world, in part, as Objects In Space. And I spend at least as much time thinking about what is also true: How much of our physical being is water. What water's properties are. How real our perceptions and projections and psychology are. That we have energetic realms that exceed our bodies, and they are the palpable power of emotion and consciousness, which travel in wave forms. How our experience, how WE are constantly changing. At times I feel more like light. Like I manifest at least as much as a wave as I do a particle. I exist (as do you) way outside the body as well as deep within it. I am both place and place-less-ness. I stand alone, And we are all one...
-- -- --
The Seas Define Our Graves.
How?
The Seas. They limit our boundaries of earth, where we live and die, the boundaries of our safe space, and do they perhaps also define what is to us unknowable, and therefore occupy the realm of our fear? If not unknowable than simply that with which we have not yet learned to identify: the fluid, and the invisible.
'The Seas' define what we are not or what we fear to admit, what we refuse to acknowledge, what we struggle against. Chaos, disorder, our utter lack of control.
Because they are deadly to us, creatures of the earth.
In that seas of emotions threaten life as we know it, provoking change, they threaten our beloved predictability, or perception of reality. Seas, emotions, wave-forms, and The Changing threaten the foundations on which we have built our ego, our story. Their existence threatens to obliterate such things.
If Sea brings death and Earth life then how do we account for the healing quality of water, or for our own 85% of our shared make up?
The Seas Define Our Graves.
Define is a nice word. To define is to limit, to mold or shape. Water defines the earth through erosion. Earth limits water with its banks and shores, its tightly-packed slow moving mass. But in the span of time, water slowly wins. We are defined by what we are not. And as we live out our years we learn more and more about What We Are Not. This is as much a relief as a heartache. I am freed to be what I am as I shrink into that shape by seeing the full large space of not-ness around me. And yet. This is a particulate notion. [there are others, as I've said, as i feel, as i hope to push the world to acknowledge.] It can be painful. The process of definition. There are always wounds, mistakes, struggles. 'De'. Is that a negative prefix? Fine. A smaller grit. More polished, more specific.
Erosion. I think of wind and water carving out canyons. Exposing layers of time. Earth and bodies becoming living histories of themselves. I think of rushing water grooving deep riverbeds down through our country. Refining and defining and re finding their path. Sometimes hopping the edge to forge new paths. Flooding planes and Having Their Way, reserving the right to re-route. I think of man pushing back with dams and bridges and reservoirs... River rocks get refined *really fine* till their surface is as smooth and reflective as the water which defined it. And I think finally of sand, the continuation of this process of constant motion. A toss-until-lost approach. Banging makes it softer, sort-of.
I think The Seas Define Our Graves is poignant because of the emotional connection between the sea and fear. Motion, that ultimate uncontrollable element, that element that comes with birth into this world of space. That which is unpredictable yet constant, and which rattles me, from inside out and outside in. Motion. CHANGE. We want it. We have it. We fear it. We fight it because we have no choice about it. And because in our desperate attempt to believe in our own power over nature we normalize The Constant. We act, in our minds, with our notions like Normal = Stillness, sameness. This is a creature comfort, a creature desire. We mistake stillness and sameness unchangingness for safety, and so we seek it, trusting only ourselves to initiate action. Feeling dominated and oppressed by other forces of power, other initiators of change. We seek what we know. What has come before. What is unchanging. But change is our only true constant. And being the flow we feel is a possibility, a choice, is not weak, but powerful. This sea of/we fear is not the enemy. In fact, it is our fear of change, our deep desire for consistency which buries us, limits us, causes our death.
Our Graves. In our graves is what we bury. What defines our graves is what buries us. The earth, the notion of stillness, the attachment to solidity, the perception of stillness and solidity, themselves an illusion or at best a temporality. We bury what we wish away - The dormant the subconscious the invisible the deniable the tugging but silent. The horror. The truth. Occasionally, we bury what we struggle to accept, once we have laid it down to rest, let go. We bury then as a way of putting it back. Into the pool. Into circulation. Out of this realm and into the next. With human death, we are given little choice. This is what is done. Graves are the last concrete, latitudinal longitudinal Earth-bound places of loss. They locate our grief on the body of this Earth. But we know that emotion such as this cannot be limited to place or in time. Emotion such as this is like we are, and bigger than we are.
The truth of death calls for a re-defining of the Self as wave form. Of the self as reflective of that oft-denied half of truth: The truth as changing, as existing in and outside of time, as being shapeless, formless, transparent and shifting...
The seas define our graves. They do. In that our fear of fluidity limits our conscious experience of existence. Our motion-related anxiety limits our evolution, limits our ability to see Truth.
Acknowledgment of FLUIDITY - it's power, it's beauty, it's essence, it's all-pervasive presence around and inside of us. Embracing it, learning to be it, championing it's wisdom, harnessing it's power, normalizing it. That is the next way that Truth will set us free.
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