“Life’s just one of the games we play

There is no special way” (Bomb The Bass)

What other games might we be playing other than life? Without our conscious minds knowing?

Say there is no unconscious mind. Only fields of mind not available to the ego. But the tiny ego is available to those vast unstructured fields and waves.

You don’t have to be thinking sth in order to know it. You just need to bring it to your thinking and then you can play with it. So where is all that knowing that you can call on when you are not using it? In neurone pathways that are somehow subdued, unactivated?? Then who is the activator? Take memory. What’s strange about memory? The weird part of you that requires that thing you can’t recall? And then you forget what you were trying to recall and then you remember anyway but then can’t remember why you needed that memory…?

Or the ability to activate the correct neurones to bring it to the you ness? Or is it that matter based neurones are the cause of the things you require access to, the entity that requires the access, and the context of the scenario? Or is it the youness that is not conscious of that memory of knowledge of memory of knowledge that says right, I can’t remember it but I know that I know it so now I will find it, but as we all know, it’s only when you avert your consciousness from the effort that the memory of the knowledge presents itself. Neurones all?

For example

you are trying to recall a piece of music. Or even more abstractly, trying to think of what music to listen to. What caverns of experience there are with tunnels and dead ends to explore – you sometimes can’t get a clear readout so you leave it and wait for the answer to come. But who/what is the explorer then?? Is it you or is it an emissary of you you send into the labyrinth? Will science find a way of turning these firing neurones into the images that the your-You sees? Will Ai soon be able(?) to present what physics says is a consequence of complex physical systems, matter/electricity(energy), that is your thinking-mind-consciousness, on a screen near you?

No. Because that information is not a readout built by neurones from data from your now/past. It comes from the now/future. The firing neurones are not the sign that you have successfully accessed the correct data and here is the song you should play. They are a sign that the data has arrived and your brain is processing it into language that you can use. Where has it arrived from then if not like magic from the meat and matter of your brain?

Well then, from consciousness.

Then where is consciousness?

Well then. Not in you.

Entropy: take an organised state and it will randomise itself. To illustrate take 1000 brown and 1000 white grains of rice and place them in two piles on a tray. Agitate the tray and the two piles will begin to merge and eventually disperse into a more or less random and even state of distribution. Probability suggests that if the agitation persists they will not re organise into two separate groups in any given time. Thus, for example, organised states of heat, that is to say in our current condition of energy/matter, heat and non-heat will disperse into non-heat in space-time. However if one removes time as a limit then probability would surely suggest that reorganisation is inevitable at some stage. Might it not then be the case that the current universe is just such a reorganisation? In which case this removes the Big Bang as a necessary model, given that all current equational illustrations of the universe work in both directions? The current state of the universe allows for differentiation of matter and energy before and after states of entropic soup and this has happened and will happen an infinite number of times. Just a thought. Probably flawed.

Regardless, it is the case that this, this Jon-ness, is how the universe feels when it’s me. And the same goes for the you-ness.

This was begun as a white on black riposte to the black on white painting i just posted about and as its unfinished I’m writing about it after that one which is finished. This was started in December and took on a weird dreamlike Xmas tree scary snow man cross star stone goddess appearance so after New Years I scattered the red pooja powder over it which adhered to the still wet areas and tipped off the excess then brushed the deepest wettest areas of red powder on white oil and this extraordinary flame like gold happened and closer up these beautiful red and orange coral forms

Now I’m waiting for these to dry before I decide what happens next

There is the happened, the happening and the not yet happened (not happened, unhappened, about to happen). Im interested in how the not yet happened becomes the happening. What does that shift look like? Is it the same as something from nothing? Is it mere probability? Fine. But what does it look like? Where does this meta-happening happen?

And where does now go? Into the cold.

So where does the not yet come from? Out from the heat?

But the future hides the death of heat so…

The now goes into the fire

Put a little man on the holy roller

Hollow roller

Hollow man

Paint him nailed

On linen canvas

As thoughts fix you in place

Over and

Over and

Over and

He conceives a grand idea

This tiny Hollowman

To sneeze his way through Proust

One word at a time then

Belch Joyce in broken phrases

As good an idea as any he thinks

After all it is

This platonic clue

That glues us all together

But what if we are unclued?

In Sherlock And The Metabletic Man

Lays concealed

The greatest trick of all –

To die untricked.

Slow flameless fire

Burns the leaves

To red to gold

To skeletons

Then wet black ash

But never

Ever

Let them know

You

Know

They

Know

You

Know

They

Know

Gone back to oil paint. I like the long drying time. It means everything remains active, alive, for days, weeks so less predictable, less controllable. I like the plasticity

I waited for weeks for something to happen with this painting after the initial work making the marks and lines, fields and particles then decided it must be done and poured a puddle of floorboard varnish all over it and began to spread with a wide brush which is the way I varnish – poor technique i imagine but I’m impatient and at that moment the Madurai Sri Meenakshi No.11 Dark Red Special Thazhampoo Kumkumam pooja powder made its entrance yet again (I’m writing this before i write about how i came across this magic powder) and added its burning rusty sunsets into the varnish finishing the painting in the final sentence of the last act.

1m/1m oil, acrylic, ochre on canvas

Does the not-existing past look the same as the not-existing future? Gone into nothing versus appearing from nothing? What does the actual going/appearing look like?

Hollowman fills up with water
It’s the idea of life that troubles him
Not life itself . He spits out
A plastic bottle
And gets on the bus called JESUS with a
Gold loan
Locker facility

I could say what this painting suggests to me pictorially, but that’d be like listening to someone else’s dream

Are you living on the premise that your life will become a complete thing only at the moment of your death?

What if, as the fragments of a hologram contain the whole image, all of your life is contained within each of its moments?

I don’t mean this as a sort of Kantian ethical mind experiment. Or a Matrix like silliness

More as a question of time.

Signs point the way and symbols represent something. Both are lent toward non-linguistic forms.

Both are also prey to magical thinking – signs and portents. We confuse them because we think they come from outside. Something outside of us is trying to tell us something. Like God, magpies, religion, myth, dropped toast etc. all these of course are side-effects of what occurs within us…

But what if symbols are not of human psychic origin at all? What if they are non-intelligent non-material extra-conscious pervasions? What if we are the symptoms?

Emma Somerset Davis is a painter, film maker and performance artist who encouraged me to do an MA and whose beautiful paintings inspired me to paint. She has this ability to put into words things that I can’t and to recognise in my work aspects i unconsciously hoped were there.

She has written this about my recent largest (150/120cm) and most ambitious painting (above) and has agreed to me posting it here:

…I really like the more sculptural forms appearing in this painting …these remind me of your found object  installation at Anna’s  …For me these forms are exciting as they animate and disrupt ‘meaningful’ orders of objects in the visible  of our day to day and make the invisible visible .. which is really inspiring and intriguing  ….… I  think this way of painting with more crystallised forms does something more interesting to your already loaded planes of colour/space in terms of exploring a mystical kind of action through painted objects, with the energy of paint rupturing and resisting  rather than creating narratives or characters…

Also visually strong for me is your more definite division of space through colour and line  …feels like a mysterious mapping of occupation/event/actions  ….. 

 ..I can’t really explain the feeling in words which is the sign of a very good painting though very exciting for you moving into this painting space

There’s a difference between flotsam and jetsam. Flotsam is whats left floating by a sunken vessel. its the outcome of a disaster. Jetsam is whats thrown overboard in order to perhaps save it, to lighten the load, or to provide flotation once the vessels gone, that is to try to change the outcome. I wrote a poem about Hemingway some years ago that touched on this

We each of us destroy ourselves in different ways

But there’s usually some irony involved

A true hero should be futile after all

Take poor Hemingway

Tossed around on horns and cast aside

A discarded husk before he died

That double wound that did Adonis did him too

When he realised it wasn’t him

Writing

At all

Bulls and boars come

For all those gods and kings

Dancing in the moonlit ring

On the bloodied silver sand

In the forest

In the glade

Which begs the question:

Faust or Oedipus?

An inkling of the tidal flood

A dawning of the awful truth just before the end:

Oh fuck so there’s

a difference

Between flotsam and jetsam

Oh God the bullring

Is the bloody and deluvian moon

Anyway I’m thinking about how i was forced to make decisions about what landscapes needed obliterating, flooding, and what needed saving or in the context of the poem, which parts told me required salvaging?

Do you ever understand anything by looking at it straight on? Nothing important is in front of you. Take death. Look at it as hard as you can. Examine it. Break it into pieces. Put it back together. Even experience it. Nothing. Understanding slides in from the side. Behind. Below. Under. Uninvited.

Also,

But

Can the subject go into an object by using thought? or can it only increase its surface? Don’t you glue/clue intelligence/understanding to the outside of a thing, a stone, a cormorant, a canvas, Love, Death, the future, wrapping it, concealing it, perhaps suffocating it? Can the subject (you) penetrate anything (other)? Or does the object penetrate you?

Anyway, after being stuck on this painting for a couple of weeks I finally made what i hope is a breakthrough. I found a packet of dark red powder we must have bought in India. Not sure what it was. Perhaps a powder for throwing at people during Holi or something. Interesting smell. I mixed it with varnish and it made a sort of tomato purée. I obliterated the hill and the tower and other details to which id become attached but were stopping work. Also the big fiery square from the last foray that I didn’t feel was working. What do i mean, not working? Something that was stopping the work moving forward. Driving forward to the end. Not obstacles as they can be got round. Impediments? Well once these areas had been puréed i could start to move in on the dynamic areas. The areas so dynamic they are parts of the end. The purée had served its purpose but wasn’t dynamic. I mixed up a big saucepan of green that I didn’t like but couldn’t waste so i rollered it over the purée. Not sure what’s next. I might sand some areas back to see what has survived.