The aesthetic of Plastic
plus a piece on Devotion and Hair.....
Welcome to the New Moon Gemini post. I’ve included two extra pieces at the bottom, as well as my usual musings. Enjoy!
Where are the words wishing to lead me today?
I don’t have the feeling that I’ve typed all that much freely of late, as I’ve quarantined computer time for work projects. My thoughts have been landing in notepads and journals instead.
The joy of this break is that – as I listen to Tanya Ekanayaka’s 18 Piano Sutras & 25 South Asian Pianisms – I feel as if I am somehow creating my own musical symphony. I call it ‘Fingertips over plastic, an Overture’. Look out Tanya, I’m coming.
It’s a stretch to find the beauty in the aesthetic or the haptic aspect of it, but there is joy to simply be discovered in the flow of it. No rush, no goal, no need, just the subtle movements that originate in my mind and find their way through my nerves into my fingertips.
I feel that I am playing with curiosity. Shifting and leaning from side to side, open to see where the song of the keys will take me, and it is taking me in a fancy direction. This happens when I deprive my creative self of any laptop access.
I swore myself off the computer for many years as it caused pain but I’ve learnt that the pain had more to do with what I was doing, and how. When I push myself into a frenzy with an expectation that I will type a million words in an hour for someone else, then my body screams STOP and my hands ache.
But when I approach it with curiosity, this almost dance-like intentionality, it feels peaceful and relaxing. I feel present, capable of resting and pausing as needed, without interrupting the thread, and I feel good about both what I am doing and how I am doing it.
And – sorry, fountain pen – it is far more productive when words per hour are the benchmark. It looks tidier too, but it doesn’t look or feel anywhere near as beautiful. I had played around with the reMarkable for a while because of this absence of beauty, but that has the same problem. The fact is that digital creation feels hollow, as though something is missing.
And it is.
I am deeply grateful that my medium is words, because they are – to my mind – the least impacted by this hollowness, this absence of heart, but you still feel something totally different when you read this nice, even print on your hand-held digital display, compared to when you open this as a letter in your letterbox.
The same goes for every medium. I’ve looked at nice paintings on the internet, and it’s a waste of time. I’ve watched nice movies on the internet, and it’s a way to pass the time. I’ve listened to nice albums on my laptop, and it’s OK at best. Thankfully there’s no meal functionality (yet) on the internet but I’m sure the meal would taste as though soy replacement products were used for every ingredient.
But when I read things on the internet it’s almost – almost – like reading a book. Which is almost like reading a handwritten letter or note.
Which is almost like listening to the author speak, which is what language and communication ultimately comes down to. I am trying to let you hear my words, my voice, and my expression. It is an oral tradition that I am compressing and redirecting into print, because you aren’t here right now.
This is something we would do well to remember. Writing is a new, fancy technology (when we look at the timeline of humans in total) designed to capture and record the spoken word. When I am reading your words, I am listening to you. If you have something important to say, and you speak it passionately, I am in conversation with you as you express it.
A master of this speech-to-words is Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti conducted the most incredible discourses and it feels as if you’re present in the conversation when you give it your total focus, and it is almost the same when you read his discourses. But it’s not the same.
This has fundamental consequences for our lives.
We are using digital technology to replace everything. Not just art, but also society. We are creating artificial spaces, like libraries, cafes, or bars, and hanging out in them together online. But it’s all a soy replacement product for the real thing.
You’re not seeing the art, you’re seeing a rapidly refreshing, pixelated reproduction of the art. Unless you’re looking at AI ‘art’, in which case you’re a sucker.
You’re not with these people in a library, café, or bar, you’re alone in your room (probably) as you look at your rapidly refreshing, pixelated reproduction people. Just as I am now, as I input this to you all.
Of course there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. You’re as much a sucker if you think we can go back to the good old days of the agricultural revolution, as if you are an AI ‘art’ enthusiast. But we can hold this in awareness whenever we are engaging with this soy-flavoured paste.
‘This is not real.’
It’s plastic. And that plastic is everywhere – including in our testicles – and it’s creating an artificial veneer over our entire experience of life. It’s creating a slippery but soft, shiny-yet-dull, monochrome finish over the vibrancy we experience in reality.
My song and dance is coming to an end. The birds are chirping beyond my window and a gentle breeze is floating in with their song, encouraging me to go and greet them both. The plastic will be here (arguably forever), but the birds and the breeze will be gone before too long.
And I’d be a fool to trade this plastic for the beauty of the present moment too often.
HAIR
You don't know if you're good at taking acid until you've done it, and luckily, I am. Or I was. It's been a long time between trips.
This particular LSD trip carried me through the night and into the morning. I preferred to trip in the morning so that I could get a good night's sleep, but this time the deck was stacked differently. You play the cards you're dealt.
I was at a festival in Victoria - it must have been 2016 - and my housemate and I decided to do the day in style. Tabs down the hatch sometime after lunch, and off into the world we went.
There were two big highlights from this trip. The first cab off the rank was as we were sitting beneath a tree just watching all the weird and wonderful characters floating about on their rainbows. (‘It's your Rainbow’ was the regular expression as the festival was called Rainbow Serpent. We, or at least I, wasn’t that high)
From out of the masses came a woman missing a few teeth, wearing a huge grin, and she made a beeline right for us. It turned out my housemate wasn't quite as resilient as I thought because he froze and waited as I handled what must have appeared to him as a demonic force, sent to ruin our little party.
She left and he unfroze, and we laughed for a solid 10 minutes at the absurdity of it all. Well, that was my motivation. I suspect he was laughing from relief.
The day continued and I lost my housemate (happens to the best of us, I assure you) but purchased a funky hat in his absence. My head was hot, and it just wouldn't cool down. I assumed the acid had simply made me hypersensitive because I was also intimately aware of which nostril was breath dominant at any given moment.
The sun was long gone, and my head was still constantly hot, but I was able to forget it by dancing to psytrance until the sun came back up. When it did the trip had subsided but the hot head had not.
Then I saw a genius, a divine message in the form of a woman.
She was holding her head under a tap, refreshing herself with running water, and I swear I could hear the click as my brain agreed that was precisely what I needed.
Now, if you've ever been ice skating or rollerblading and have taken off those shoes after a long session, or have taken a piss after you've had to hold on for a really long time you might think you have an idea of what relief feels like. I can assure you, you have no idea.
The feeling of the water running over my head after having had a hot head for 12 hours became the single greatest feeling of relief I've experienced in my entire life. Nothing has come close.
I put the whole thing down to the acid and got on with my life. Can't spend all day dancing barefoot in the dirt with the hippies.
Fast forward two months and I'm at a birthday party, and my brother kindly points out that I'm losing my hair. He's wrong, of course. My hair has always been a bit thinner on the sides.
Right?
A couple of weeks later, I was sitting on my couch grabbing chunks of my hair trying to measure whether or not it's possible my brother was correct. And then it hits me.
The memory of the trip returns and I realised with blistering obviousness there was no magical experience happening because of the acid. I just burnt the top of my head because it was summer in Australia and my God-given head protection had started to fail in its duty.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how LSD helped me to integrate and accept the fact that I was losing my hair. Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one, even when psychedelics are involved.
DEVOTION
The topic of devotion feels at once foreign and familiar. I have a tendency to view how other people approach things as devoted and impressive, but when I search for that same devotion in my own life, it feels absent.
When people settle down with their high school sweetheart, (devoted husband/wife waiting to be inscribed on a stone), or settle into a lifetime career (devoted employee waiting to be an email headline), I have never seen devotion. Some exceptions, sure, but it often looks to my eyes more like going with the flow rather than devotion new line
The only person I can think of who is devoted to their high school sweetheart is also devoted to their career as much as he is devoted to his recreational pursuit of dancing. Yet when I look for this same devotion in myself, it feels as though it's absent. But the problem is in the comparison, not in the devotion.
I've come to understand that I am devoted to doing many things, but only for as long as those things are providing me and my community with what we need. Things change and when they do, I change with them. There is yet another thing calling for my devotion.
Some things stick and overtime my days are becoming more and more filled with activities that I can see I hold a devotion towards, such as writing or reading. Always was (a writer and a reader), always will be.
I come to see you time and time again just how dangerous and destructive comparison is and I dread to think how much worse it could be for an impressionable Instagram kid.
But maybe they can find the diamonds in the rough, those who are living a life of devotion and sharing it because they love what they're doing so much. I hope so, with all my strength.
Because after all, I'm doing exactly the same here, just with words. I don't write to share, I share because I write. And that feels like an act of devotion.
