AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

I can't even write a coherent sentence about my life anymore. I guess to an extent it's been like this from day one. Everything that's going on just seems like such nonsense anyway. When I have something on my mind that weighs on me heavily, I may start out with the intention of describing real events and real feelings that actually happened, but I won't get far before it has all degenerated into awkward end-rhyme verses and random descriptions of fantasy scenarios.

You know how there's this notion that most people think in words, and only a few people (mostly children and artists) think in terms of pictures? Well, I'm not sure which category I fit into. Sometimes, sentence fragments may pop into my mind, and sometimes, I'll feel conversations going through my head, but most of the time these are echoes of something that somebody else said to me, or that I said to them. They're not really my thoughts so much as they are my memories. Occasionally distorted ones.

And a lot of the time images come into my mind, some of them similar to things I have seen - some distorted, some fantastical. Most of these images, however, lack fidelity, and at first "look" may appear stunning and vibrant; but any attempt to look at the smaller details reveals that their surfaces are ever shifting, literally crawling as they fade in and out of focus, recognized but not recognizable. It's like a familiar face seen only in your peripheral vision, identified but not identifiable. I've lost many great ideas for art projects this way, struggling in vain to call their images back to me as I sketch frantically. Fruitlessly.

It's like trying to remember a dream 3 days later, but you can go through the whole experience in a second.

And this is odd because if I want to, and I have already clearly defined it, I can hold an image in my mind's eye for quite a while. I can even project that image outwards into the world, and see it as a transparent overlay on my "real" vision. I often do this at work when I have to count many objects - rather than speaking the numbers, I visualize a numerical readout on the edge of my field of view. (That way, when jerks try to distract me by shouting random strings of numbers at me, it doesn't work.) If I focus strongly enough, I can even make the image opaque - so it actually blocks out my "real" vision (I can only maintain this for a short time, however).

But these cannot rightly be called "thoughts" either.

What's going on in my mind most of the time doesn't seem much like word or picture. In terms of the 5 senses, they more closely resemble tastes or, um, "touches" than anything visual or aural. I suppose you might characterize them as "emotion".

In that sense, perhaps you could say that I "think in feelings" most of the time, which might be another way of saying that I don't think at all most of the time.

When I am writing it feels almost exactly like when I build things from wax - I am not translating some preconceived notion into form, but rather adding a dab of wax here, a dab there, according to both whim and the demands of that which has come before. A section of wax that has been partially built up demands to be built up further until it distinguishes itself in form and scale from other parts of the wax, which in turn are now also distinguished by their utter lack of distinction. And so it goes, on and on, until the piece becomes such an insufferable, chaotic mess that it must be discarded, or until I am too tired or distracted to work on it any longer. It is always this way, and never because the construct in question is "finished". Nothing ever reaches a point of such coherence and elegance that it demands to be left alone.

So it goes with my writing as well. I rarely, if ever, have a point to make, and the avenues of thought I build upon are chosen because they are the avenues that have been started already, and so I dab a word here, dab a word there, until some kind of structure emerges.

And it continues, on and on, one layer after another, until I tire of the exercise, or the exercise tires of me.

Case in point.