Being a 23 year old artist in 2019, I am going places, for no apparent reason.
Today, transporting myself around London, going places, my thoughts turned to readjusting to London Life after Six Months working on a cruise ship. It was a transformative experience, and now I have no idea what to do, but I have an idea of how to find out what I want to do. That somehow is position myself in places and spaces, places with an ineffable sense of calm, feeling like well placed plant in a garden bed. To this end, I sat in a coffee shop above a garden centre, in a sandblasted high-backed wooden chair, transcending the usual levels of unphased pretention, to figure out the what.
My happiest obsession is towards contriving witty observations and sudden affordances, and scratching them with a blind hope in their relevance and potential into a small black notebook resting in the palm of my hand, reporting on the state of the universe, talking to myself in the past, present, and future. IUnderstandably, this means that once I flip back a few pages, I have absolutely no idea what I have written and why, but its always fun to try and work it out by piecing together the contexts. I have about 15 notebooks, of different shapes and sizes since I started doing this a few years ago. Over the course of my contract on a Cruise Ship, I filled three and a half of them, and brought one full one along as a kind of reminder to flip through, as it contains gleaned comments on what reality I actually choose to believe in, when I forget, and lose centre.
Sitting here, now, in front of this one, It would seem now that I am being drawn back into London Life, its pace, and its senses. Social Media platforms are engineered to keep you on them as long as possible, and it feels like whatever sense of centre, or being happily lost in The Distance Between is harder to come by.
This, I feel, is the readjustment. A quick and abrupt re-adjustment is London pulling focus suddenly whilst your back is turned. This can be depressing. I've found its important to allow myself to notice, just notice, not attribute too many meanings to things whilst in this liminal state. In some senses, I feel that God, that sense of centred calm, is [citation needed] a long way off [citation needed], himself [citation needed], scrolling through his own black mirror, sucked into cyberspace, past reams of memes that appear before Him, after having been pumped out at lighting speed from the maw of complex machine with a kind of hopper on top of it, a machine that is kept fed by hypnotised facebook mums on a mixture of human and cat hair that is ripped out by the fistful from the destitute heads of vacuum cleaners that apparently once roamed cyberspace free and clean in a golden age.
There is a knot here, and it is worth unpicking. It is not just about readjusting, blindly feeling your way back to reality like a mole scratching though mediums. This ties into having faith in the idea of centre, rather than having to consistently prove to myself that it exists. I do this by testing myself against people, against contexts. This is exhausting, and I forget that there is a certain invulnerability to being vulnerable.
Driving, I was beeped at a fair few times when turning, and saw the frustrated silent head shaking as I moved into poisiton at junctions. To these people, I thank them relentlessly as I swing out. On foot, a concerned citizen behind me in the self check out queue calls out "UM 'SCUSE ME'" as I left the machine momentarily to get a plastic bag. I turned around and said "Almost There", with a patient smile. Here, in London, in a Tesco that looks the same as every other Tesco except with different corners and a different temperature, I was Talking Back. I think she thought "This man must be from Up North/Is Talking To Me/Frequently Buys Lemons at Tesco." I'm not. And I havent bought lemons in six months. Ship Life has obviously made me a terrible driver with no spatial awareness, or maybe im just aware of how much people have somewhere to go, even though they'll never get there long enough until the next destination rears its big grinning neon face. Being away for six months, away from the Brexit Gloom means that I have lost the ability to be London-efficient in every act. I no longer dance with the lemons across the barcode scanner with grace and the ever present, ineffable threat of time-pressure. I no longer furtively stuff my purchases into my pockets so I can say I don't need a plastic bag, hoping that on some high frequency thats one more win for the Green Team.
Its this reaction to my own action that I am afforded in London, and just learning to let go is the key. Slowly does it.
(NB: After writing this, I briefly flirted with the term "Lime Pressure", fantasising about true artistic integrity. To my suprise, it flirted back. There was a beautiful spark, there, at the beginning. That term promised me a one man Edinburgh Fringe Show, previewed in some pub by 15 corduroy friends, and an eight hour drive listening to alternative dreampop, smiling with a glazed expression from pink windows, going on the little rocket ship outside the service station and falling over, walking in cold dusks hand in hand until the blue of the sky makes the orange of the lights reflect in the eyes of lime like hot coals of promise, and then it promised me all quick meaningful hand gestures, and high banked seating, and just four lights on me, cold, warm, cold, warm, and for me to be received not even lukewarmly by extra adventurous fringegoers, and then it left me. And I was cold and listless, confused after such a rollercoaster of expectation and hot lime sex. The lime rolled down the royal mile. Nobody paid it much notice amongst the noise of the Fringe. And as I watched that object dissappear around the Cursed Statue of Adam Smith, I looked down to find myself holding a now hopelessly thick stack of flyers, flimsy and stupid now, wet with the perpetual drizzle, some stuck together, the top layers fluttering pathetically in the darkening breeze, plastered with my stupid face, and my stupid idea to turn citrus fruit into a sharp social commentary, and the words 'debut', 'promising', 'hilarious', once smouldering with passion, now fizzing out beningly, and promising to myself that i'd never really love again, but then a small voice at the back of my heart now picking me back up and saying "well there's always lemons" with a kick and a nudge). Lemons.
Today, transporting myself around London, going places, my thoughts turned to readjusting to London Life after Six Months working on a cruise ship. It was a transformative experience, and now I have no idea what to do, but I have an idea of how to find out what I want to do. That somehow is position myself in places and spaces, places with an ineffable sense of calm, feeling like well placed plant in a garden bed. To this end, I sat in a coffee shop above a garden centre, in a sandblasted high-backed wooden chair, transcending the usual levels of unphased pretention, to figure out the what.
My happiest obsession is towards contriving witty observations and sudden affordances, and scratching them with a blind hope in their relevance and potential into a small black notebook resting in the palm of my hand, reporting on the state of the universe, talking to myself in the past, present, and future. IUnderstandably, this means that once I flip back a few pages, I have absolutely no idea what I have written and why, but its always fun to try and work it out by piecing together the contexts. I have about 15 notebooks, of different shapes and sizes since I started doing this a few years ago. Over the course of my contract on a Cruise Ship, I filled three and a half of them, and brought one full one along as a kind of reminder to flip through, as it contains gleaned comments on what reality I actually choose to believe in, when I forget, and lose centre.
Sitting here, now, in front of this one, It would seem now that I am being drawn back into London Life, its pace, and its senses. Social Media platforms are engineered to keep you on them as long as possible, and it feels like whatever sense of centre, or being happily lost in The Distance Between is harder to come by.
This, I feel, is the readjustment. A quick and abrupt re-adjustment is London pulling focus suddenly whilst your back is turned. This can be depressing. I've found its important to allow myself to notice, just notice, not attribute too many meanings to things whilst in this liminal state. In some senses, I feel that God, that sense of centred calm, is [citation needed] a long way off [citation needed], himself [citation needed], scrolling through his own black mirror, sucked into cyberspace, past reams of memes that appear before Him, after having been pumped out at lighting speed from the maw of complex machine with a kind of hopper on top of it, a machine that is kept fed by hypnotised facebook mums on a mixture of human and cat hair that is ripped out by the fistful from the destitute heads of vacuum cleaners that apparently once roamed cyberspace free and clean in a golden age.
There is a knot here, and it is worth unpicking. It is not just about readjusting, blindly feeling your way back to reality like a mole scratching though mediums. This ties into having faith in the idea of centre, rather than having to consistently prove to myself that it exists. I do this by testing myself against people, against contexts. This is exhausting, and I forget that there is a certain invulnerability to being vulnerable.
Driving, I was beeped at a fair few times when turning, and saw the frustrated silent head shaking as I moved into poisiton at junctions. To these people, I thank them relentlessly as I swing out. On foot, a concerned citizen behind me in the self check out queue calls out "UM 'SCUSE ME'" as I left the machine momentarily to get a plastic bag. I turned around and said "Almost There", with a patient smile. Here, in London, in a Tesco that looks the same as every other Tesco except with different corners and a different temperature, I was Talking Back. I think she thought "This man must be from Up North/Is Talking To Me/Frequently Buys Lemons at Tesco." I'm not. And I havent bought lemons in six months. Ship Life has obviously made me a terrible driver with no spatial awareness, or maybe im just aware of how much people have somewhere to go, even though they'll never get there long enough until the next destination rears its big grinning neon face. Being away for six months, away from the Brexit Gloom means that I have lost the ability to be London-efficient in every act. I no longer dance with the lemons across the barcode scanner with grace and the ever present, ineffable threat of time-pressure. I no longer furtively stuff my purchases into my pockets so I can say I don't need a plastic bag, hoping that on some high frequency thats one more win for the Green Team.
Its this reaction to my own action that I am afforded in London, and just learning to let go is the key. Slowly does it.
(NB: After writing this, I briefly flirted with the term "Lime Pressure", fantasising about true artistic integrity. To my suprise, it flirted back. There was a beautiful spark, there, at the beginning. That term promised me a one man Edinburgh Fringe Show, previewed in some pub by 15 corduroy friends, and an eight hour drive listening to alternative dreampop, smiling with a glazed expression from pink windows, going on the little rocket ship outside the service station and falling over, walking in cold dusks hand in hand until the blue of the sky makes the orange of the lights reflect in the eyes of lime like hot coals of promise, and then it promised me all quick meaningful hand gestures, and high banked seating, and just four lights on me, cold, warm, cold, warm, and for me to be received not even lukewarmly by extra adventurous fringegoers, and then it left me. And I was cold and listless, confused after such a rollercoaster of expectation and hot lime sex. The lime rolled down the royal mile. Nobody paid it much notice amongst the noise of the Fringe. And as I watched that object dissappear around the Cursed Statue of Adam Smith, I looked down to find myself holding a now hopelessly thick stack of flyers, flimsy and stupid now, wet with the perpetual drizzle, some stuck together, the top layers fluttering pathetically in the darkening breeze, plastered with my stupid face, and my stupid idea to turn citrus fruit into a sharp social commentary, and the words 'debut', 'promising', 'hilarious', once smouldering with passion, now fizzing out beningly, and promising to myself that i'd never really love again, but then a small voice at the back of my heart now picking me back up and saying "well there's always lemons" with a kick and a nudge). Lemons.
