the problem is the solution

I haven't written in a while.  I've not been in a very good head space.  I've been wallowing in a particular troublesome situation aggravating my life.

My thoughts and behavior have been irrational, inappropriate, fearful, schizophrenic.  I've been depressed and angry. I've been gleefully banging my head against a solid concrete wall, spraying blood everywhere. 

What it comes down to is this: I've been wrestling with reality. 

My over-developed need to critique, judge, and qualify has led me to declare the particular reality I happen to be in at this moment a mistake, impossible, wrong.  I've devoted a great deal of energy and effort into willing things to be different.  Unfortunately, my telekenetic remote control for the universe and all the people in it seems to be on the fritz.

This morning, I was in a meeting with the creative team of an ad agency I work with, and we played some idea-generating games.  One of those games rocked my reality and cracked open something in me spiritually.  The game is called: "The Problem is the Solution."

The premise allows you to turn a design challenge on its head.  If you have a problem of limited space and lots of products to feature, then your solution is featuring lots of products in a limited space--you use density to your advantage. 

For me, this premise caused a sudden white-hot flash of consciousness. 

In the rooms, they talk about reaching a point in recovery where you "stop fighting anybody or anything."  I've always wondered how that could be possible.  Then came the game.  "The Problem is the Solution." To anything!

Have a problem of not enough money?  The solution is you don't have enough money.  Act accordingly.

Have a problem falling asleep?  The solution is you can't fall asleep.  Act accordingly.

Perhaps this makes no sense to you.  Perhaps it seems a little insane.

If you have a problem buying this concept, the solution is not to buy this concept.  Act accordingly, and move on.

The root principal, of course, is acceptance. 

Acceptance, I'm learning, is a profound spiritual practice at which I'm not very good at all. 

Acceptance fucks frankly with your ego patterns.  It twists your panties and unravels your knitting. Resistance is futile.

What I love about the game--this concept that the problem is the solution--is that it opens doors to action.  It doesn't have the passive, face-down-ass-up implications that sometimes accompany the term 'acceptance.'  You don't wallow in resignation, you arrive at a solution, which directs the next right step.  Solution implies resolution, moving on. 

For me it means, hopefully, getting un-stuck...

Passion, beauty, and love, folks--24 hours at a time...

desire

We dwell at the center of a web--thirsty spiders, all.

Every tremor, every tug at the silver strands arrayed around us, sends us careening after blood--hurtling after appetite.

Somewhere along the way we acquire ideas about desire.  We indulge.  We refrain.  We get sticky, hung up in our own web.

Sometimes we tangle up desire in a clutch of steely threads, poking our fangs sharply through the object's soft skull, sucking out its steaming, pulpy matter.  We tongue the clutch dry.  Drain the object past the point of resembling anything we first thought we were after.  We cling to the husk, empty and twisting on the line...

Desire drives the universe.  All things act from desire.  Drama occurs when lines of desire intersect.

We, however, with our structures of civility, with our Byzantine moral wanderings, with our existential angst and our need to be somebody--we try to cling to our desires.  We buck the web with our grasping.  We fling drops of dew.  We spread ourselves wide, trying to pull the web back into us, trying to ingest the entire thing so it belongs forever and totally to us alone.

Desire, though, can never be caught in a web, although it may stir the strands like a breeze.  Desire is urge, not action.  Thirst, not liquid.  We can only allow ourselves to be licked and fondled by desire until our entire body is electric and yearning.

As shocked, startled, horrified, or delighted as we may be by it, our desires arise from the deepest place in us.  Desire leads us onward like a will o' the wisp.  It drives us like a galleon master. 

And desire, while so often villified and scorned, is itself elemental, primal, raw. 

We are the ones, in the end, who by our own actions determine if we will, racing after desire, be destroyed or transformed.

Passion, beauty, and love, folks--24 hours at a time...

hungry eyes

"The Eyes of Laura Mars" is on upstairs--ironic, because today I've been pricked by a strange, contemplative reverie about photography and second sight...

My sweetie got me a nice digital camera for my birthday/our anniversary/christmas/easter/labor day, etc. ad infinitum...

I find photography to be a compelling and seductive medium.

As someone who paints and draws, I understand the intimacy between artist and subject. However with a camera, there is something mechanical, something blind yet seeing, something fetishistic and totemic, which simultaneously denies and forces a hyper-intense intimacy between artist and subject.

From behind the camera, my experience is seductively voyeuristic and at the same time clinically predatorial. In front of the camera, I have the sensation of a medical exam by a doctor with cold hands...

The product, though, the work created, the image made, is always something more (and less) than the photographer and the photographed.

There is a strange alchemy that occurs in the shutter and click between occulus and lens. That is why I'm amazed by great photographers and by those who are truly photogenic.

Great photographers use cameras to lie, to sculpt, to steal light, and seduce shadows. There are entire universes contained in a single image, and as "real" as that image is, it is somehow not accurate... There is a superstitious exchange of light and soul. Not the Crazy Horse fear of the soul being sucked into the camera and oiled out flat in negatives, but the subtle difference that comes from looking at a person or thing through the eyes of a machine...

A great photographer teaches the camera to see in a way that is somewhat, but never entirely human... As for the great photogenics of the world (Marilyn their patron saint), I wonder if there is something mechanical and inhuman flickering in their synapses that somehow recognizes and projects--machine to machine--a calculated doppleganger of the sweaty meat that exists in time and air?

Richard Avedon is famous for drawing subjects in, for teasing souls out of organic cavities to flutter and play over the features of flesh...

avedon

The photograph below by Giuseppe Pocetti is one of my favorites. Here it's all about visual sex. The camera becomes an extended eye-phallus of the photographer, creating a short circuit between vision and crotch. There's something occulted, something linguistic about the composition, a tease that is not playful but seriously sexual...tiny bubbles, pink nipples-- but this is no burlesque...it's soapy and dirty...

pocetti

The next photo is by Dylan Ricci, who is technically an excellent photographer, although I think his work is sort of hit-and-miss. He does have a remarkable ability, nevertheless, to transubstantiate flesh into mineral... The bodies of his men are slick metallic, sculpted of glistening mud, twisted and licked by oily, barbed-wire hair... Nipples like the somber eyes of african gods... Lust is conjured through the sheer object-ness of this man. There isn't room to negotiate an encounter, there's no guarantee of more...just an open stance with a trail of promise...

ricci

As I walk around my world each day, I am aware of myself as voyeur. I watch people, stare at bodies shifting under clothing, imagine what shapes suggest...

Security cameras in parking lots, convenient stores, elevators, obviously have no such self awareness...their vision is sentinel, unsentimental, black-and-white, shifting static punctuated by over-exposed faces and t-shirts.

I wonder if technology will ever let us download the images captured by our eyes, sans camera? A USB cord for the brain... How would those images look? Would we startle ourselves with the calculated objectiveness of our world views? Would we be astonished by beauty that we miss when just glancing around? Would we see in print, the hunger that lies behind our eyes, the covetousness (as Hannibal would say) we feel towards that which we see every day?

All I can say is keep your eyes open...

Passion, beauty, and love, folks...life is short...

at the cusp of the year

Today is that silent moment between the final exhale of 2007 and the first intake of breath of 2008.  New Year's Day is a suspended day, timeless, a set of hours for transition, reflection, anticipation.

If I were to assign a Tarot card to my life for the past year, it would surely be the Tower: great upheaval, profound destruction, deconstruction--a collapse of flimsy ego structures erected in vain to channel the flow of the universe...  A searing bolt of lightning, ripping the sky asunder, toppling stones, releasing heat.  A cracking of foundations, a tectonic shifting of paradigms, a breaching of defenses.  2007 was a year of violence.  Rich, meaty, spiritual violence.  My soul was flayed, eviscerated, set free...

The me of today is razor bright and clear when I think of the self I occupied a year ago.  The dawn of 2007 was dim.  Light scarce and fading.  Not until the end of April did I find my way out of winter.

So I peer out into the mist of 2008 with much curiosity and cautious hope.  I have indisputably left the safety of the Shire.  The road ahead leads certainly toward adventure and hidden treasures.  I am ready for the journey.

As is tradition on this potent day of transition, I consider my resolve for approaching the days ahead:

• It is my intention to surrender daily and deeply to that poetic mystery that flickers behind the eyes of the waking world--the sly, subtle wink of a higher power.


• It is my intention to delight in my body, to devote myself to its care and protection as the sensory vehicle of my journey.


• It is my intention to approach life with an attitude of gratitude and love, to honor my soul, my wisdom, and my heart, and to acknowledge fear while refusing to be governed by it


• It is my intention to accept life with wonder and reverence, myself, my foibles and flaws included.


• It is my intention to celebrate my phenomenal exterior life and my mythical interior life with words, images, music, sex, food, farts, hugs, and laughter.  Let nothing be unholy, let no moment be profane.


• It is my intention to undo latches, to keep company with curiosity, to ignore the posted rules.


• It is my intention to dwell in the poetry of eternity, the mystery of transience, the paradox of love.

To all of you in cyberspace who are the Eumenides and chorus to my sometimes-comedy/sometimes-tragedy of a life, thank you.  I wish you bright blessings, warm wishes, and slick, sticky kisses in all the right places all year long.

Have a marvelous 2008!

Passion, beauty, and love, folks--24 hours at a time...