Leo month continues...

LIfe expands or contracts in proportion to one's courage.

- Anais Nin

Who made it?

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

- Marcel Duchamp

The thin strip of reality...

The material world, aka "reality," is such a tightly regulated space, it can only take a sliver of us at a time. The vast rest of our self must sit and watch from the unearthly sidelines. And the things we put into this space are at best crude and fragile representations of abstract notions and cognitive or emotional constructs. Artists try to bring things into reality that remind us of the rest of being. Politicians try to own this narrow strip of experience. Kids are bored by it, and adults struggle to maintain their place in it. Crazy thing.

Dark knight of the poop...

A friend tells me about his best moments of connectivity with his partner, and how strangely, in the rumpled sheet of afterlove, he sees a bright purple light in front of his eyes that is deeply pleasing. He's just been married. This is bliss. The light is not cause for alarm, it is a psychic aurora borealis celebrating the goodness. And then, as can happen, an iota of doubt enters his mind. Fear. Did I do the right thing? Suddenly the purple light turns brown. Shit brown.

And we carry brown around with us because it represents how we might be feeling about our days. Our actual days, the ones in reality, which are just a sliver of our personal internal experience at any given moment. Brown is honest. But brown is not the answer. One must strive to paint their days with other colors.

And walking home from the coffee shop I see people marching their brown about. I can see it in their body language. I can see it in their mood. I can see it in their feces.

(Gao Huijun, "Clouds on Jingting Mountains")