Vain Repetition

Like Totally seeks separation from the cloudy flow that swells from the meaning.

She locks herself up in the deep-deep cave and turns on the music, but lyrics are leaking the meaning.

She must run upstairs for a bottle of red-red wine.

It sucks, that she turns to this measure remembering her son-alcoholic warning that she is eligible, too.

But how else can she shield the meaning that shouts into her ears making them deaf for life?

How else can she pick up a brush and charge it with paint to release the first feeble smear and welcome the first startling mistake?

Now as she cannot rely on her meaning any more, painting may start making sense.

She releases herself squirting paint like a penis deeply invested in the process of vain repetition.

breaking silence

She breaks what feels like a yearlong dumb silence,

like others break glass or bread,

but it is essential for Like Tottaly to forget all about the others

to utter an authentic sound,

a mere coarse cough.

new staff wanted

Like Totally lives in the Cave in the basement of a building. She sleeps there in oblivion below the floors. Loud footsteps on the upper stories don’t bother her. She wakes up once in many days to write a sentence or two only to fall into lethargy again. To wake her up is not an easy step, first of all because mostly she gets forgotten. Busy footsteps on the upper stories don’t slow down for her sake. We feel sorry for her. There must be a paid position in the building, something like underintendent, to attend to her 24/7, but it is an unrealistic goal since the whole building is underfunded. Everyone here gets paid below minimal wage, and to open a position to attend to someone who doesn’t bother us while she is sleeping like Like Totally seems unpractical to our administration. And maybe they are right, but the rest of us feel somewhat neglected, too, because of her. Call it a socialist thinking or a childish sentiment, but Like Totally should be taken in consideration. If I were in charge, I'd first of all hire a research group to get a better understanding of who she is and why she lives there. It is important to figure out if she is a homeless creature who needs resources to get herself up to the upper floors, or a fantastic creature, a product of our imagination, because in that case we may establish some rites to honor her. They will help to unite us all and make us feel better.
Meanwhile, while she is brewing there, we, the people of upstairs, live with guilty conscience.              

recognotion

Like Totally looks in the mirror. She has to admit that she is not eleven years old any more, but she can still recognize the eleven years old self in her current reflection.
Some people must live for expectations, and Like Totally, too, has striven to meet them as hard as she could, but today she has to admit that she couldn’t.
Not everyone has to live for expectations. Some may find recognition in their own reflection almost fifty years later.

the practice of perpetual pretence

Once, too, Like Totally has been a little human girl trained to the notion of the good-better-best. Keep practicing, she has been advised, and you’ll get better; devote yourself, and you’ll be the best.

Like many other little girls, Like Totally hasn’t practiced because of the perpetual distractions, and now she wonders who has been distracting her and why?

She remembers sitting in the classroom and looking outside the window, nothing happening there but birds chirping in the trees.

To this day Like Totally loves birds in the branches of birch trees, like those outside the classroom window. No kids have been shouting there, no music played, no ball tossed, but a bunch of sparrows chirping in the trees.

And today Like Totally comes to the conclusion that the whole objective of the classes taught in that classroom has been listening to the birds chirping in the trees.

Like Totally sips some more wine.

Yes, there has been some notion of purpose and excellence there, but does it matter today? Only chirping birds still sound in her ears. Does anyone who has been in that class remember their sweet tune today?

But how about the practice?

Does Like Totally still practice what the teachers taught her to practice when she has been a young girl? 

Well, of cause she does! She practices it daily.

It is the practice of perpetual pretense.   

 

what she can do?

 Ken Currie, 2013, at Miami Basel

On the way between Scope and Miami Basel, two electrifying art events in Florida, Like Totally nearly stumbles over the dirty bare feet sticking awkwardly into the busy pedestrian way. They belong to a homeless woman sleeping next to her dog, both neatly curved on the narrow lawn, and the woman’s head on the dog’s shoulder.

I don’t know, Like Totally thinks, it is even too much. It would be easier to ignore this woman if she were without that dog near her. Their closeness is too humane to scorn. Is there anything I can do?

Like Totally is very bad at doing anything. She raises her eyes to the level of shopping windows that feature swimming suits and Christmas decorations according to the season. She looks at her companion pacing next to her. Has he noticed? Is he aware that she keeps thinking of that woman? Like Totally hates to change cheerful disposition of their vacation. She casts her eyes away. But the only thing she can honestly do is to keep thinking of her. And the only thing she can honestly do is to keep  the homeless woman on the narrow lawn in Miami sleeping next to her furry mate in memory.  

grades

After a long and careful look Like Totally admits that while good people around her are mostly consist of private properties, successful careers, and formidable credentials, she exemplifies an unlikely and totally unsubstantial composition of wire and plastic shopping bags held together by Scotch - not the Scotch as in whiskey, which would be highly improbable but very nice, but the Scotch as in packing tape.
Like Totally is doomed to running an extra mile to sustain unsustainable. Not that good people take it easy; they too work hard to keep their thing going, but here is the difference: their thing belongs to reality they all believe in, while Like Totally’s is totally ephemeral and insufficient for solid prove.
Despair makes her to take some lecture course where she learns that there is hope. First of all, there are some vocabularies that can be applied to her situation. When people exchange words*, it is called a discourse, the thing that encourages dissertations. For the simpler mind like Like Totally who doesn’t write dissertations, there is an alternative promise of practice. Practice is a tedious repetition with the narrow goal of achieving excellence. What one chooses as a subject of practice doesn’t matter, because practice in itself is the justification of repetitive action no matter how insignificant. We can even design a logo for out practice and print it on our jersey; we all know that, don’t we?

Like Totally, poor thing, how pitiful you are! You cannot even practice properly, can you? Of cause you can’t, because practice, too, has to be graded, so it presumes some jury, and where are you going to find one, if in order to create you want to be alone? Plus “creating” is a funny word which any serious discourse should be careful about, because it presumes that something can be done out of nothing, or something can be gained out of something lesser, which is already some kind of nonsense, because nothing can come out of nothing, can’t it? 

* the thickness of words in the current vocabulary has a grade insufficient for discourse.   

imagination

Like Totally is alone in the room she calls The Cave. Her work is buried here together with her life. She fears this place and seeks it nevertheless, because it is where her muses visit her. Muses show her the next step in every painting; they are messengers from Imagination. Like Totally’s work is easy as well as her life. She doesn’t beg Imagination to change her fate of living in obscurity. Like Totally knows that it is she who lives for Imagination, and not vise versa.      

parts and holes

Everything around me and inside me is tearing and falling apart, Like Totally observes, sometimes slower and sometimes faster. I am on duty collecting broken parts and mending open holes, she sighs, sometimes faster and sometimes slower.  

That is what she has dreamt last night: a tall shady half figure throwing her long awkward arms made of tape and wire in the thick air above and around her, and the voice saying, mend that what is breaking. 

readymade words

Like Totally is not the one, for whom the words are the result of some organic growth. For her they are the readymade. When she composes a sentence she compares herself to an artist who doesn’t draw an original image: she paste words on a page like elements of collage. When the work is done, she takes a look at it from the stretched arm distance with one eye closed. If she likes what she sees, she nods her head in approval.

She hates to revisit her writing because it never looks right again.    

the petals in her head

When morning peony of migraine pain opens petal by petal in her head, Like Totally rises from her bed and taming shivers wraps herself in the throw. She focuses attention on her pain assessing if she can drink from the mug of hot black tea, or should surrender to the surge of vomit.
If after a second sip of tea she gushes, her day turns into a violence of flesh, compulsive tremors alternating with the fits of chocking, and gripping vomit thickening intolerable headache; her thoughts subside and feelings become irrelevant.

If she can finish unsweetened tea and keep the pills inside her stomach, she focuses attention on the balance between her inability to move and an impulse to continue on routine. Her feelings subside and thoughts diminish, but she can vilely document self-observations.  

paleolithic formation

It is easy to talk when someone listens, Like Totally complains.

My audience consists of the dead people,

Whose silence is awkward like Paleolithic formation,

And I have no idea how to break it into words.

poop

The word she feels like saying is unknown to her. The longer she waits the harder it gets.
Come on, Like Totally, don’t get so anal now! There is nothing there to analyze before you get it out!
Shhh… There she hides, locked up in the bathroom. No one can see her there, so she takes her time.
Come on, Like Totally, no one is waiting to analyze your shit anyway!

an overdue labor

The word she wants to say is too big for her throat. Getting it out feels like an overdue labor.
Like Totally had three babies in her human life, three overdue labors. With the first one, she got induced in the hospital; with the second one, she used enema inadvertently starting birth activity; with the third one, the labor came after tree days of building a rock garden.
Professional help, self-medication, or obsessive activity: are there other choices in there? Like Totally rocks idly in her chair. What name will she give to what she might be pregnant with now?             

the wilderness within

Like Totally in her aloneness is as alone as a homeless on weekdays, the homeless who presses aching back against a wall and stares absently at passing feet. The passing feet have no faces and neither do unknowns populating the high-rises towering above his head.
“Aloneness,” Like Totally observes, “brings neither peace, nor self-knowledge.”
The homeless gets up on feeble feet and exits from the stoop to leave Like Totally to listen to the footfalls.
“Is there a state of silence for the one who seeks asylum?”
“Oh, yes, there is. Look in the wilderness!”
“Who sells the maps, itinerary, tickets,” Like Totally persists,
 “to the state of Wilderness,the Wilderness within?”

she is not alone

Like Totally is not at all alone 

as she has looked at last at those who are around her.

desperado

 Painting she cannot finish because she has lost the nerve

“Judge is a criminal and judgment is a crime,” cries Like Totally. “I am a desperado, pathetic evaluator of what is good in painting or even worth what is better. Acceptance is the courage but I have lost the nerve!”
But there is “good” in painting
“Good” is alive

who longs

Like Totally mislaid amid disordered thoughts

Observes the cloud swaddling them like babies

All voices outside the cradle get distorted

Like Totally in desperate attempt to reestablish  

Meaning checks the Webster

But put together words refuse to check.

Like Totally commits to total madness like

Someone with disordered thoughts who longs

For answers

a gloomy hole

Monks who abandon world

to pray for world’s salvation

at least are not alone.

Why practice art that turns me in a loner?

I practice art because I am a loner.

Is artist’s studio a gloomy hole?

It is a gloomy hole where someone

who feels alone escapes to feel connected.

a follower, a leader, and a hermit

New season is approaching to tap into her longing for new style. Like Totally’s convinced that being a forerunner of fashion reflects a leader in her. To strengthen this appeal she always chooses the latest, sharpest fashion. So, what’s going wrong today that, as she fastens her car key to the handle of new tote and zips new iPhone in the tiny purse, compels her wonder,  “…am I a follower, instead?” 
“Of cause you are, a fool, a follower of style!” The answer comes, “to be a human you are a follower, a leader, and a hermit. The former is most visible in you, the latter is as good as dead, the mutant in the mid who thinks herself a lead instead is being lead by popular demand!”

bathroom tiles continued

Her gaze is fixed on bathroom tiles
each one of them a clear formulation 
of blank slate
tabula rasa
even a single one is plenty but they are -how many?- 
one, two…
but maybe it is better to look inside each frame?

Anxiety, her shadow, is her rival
bypassing her on treks of thoughts
it teases: too many on the bathroom wall for you
to study each in depth
life is too short for you
and one of them – which one, by the way?-
is clearly your death…

bathroom tiles

She’s hardly made it to bed tonight, so tired she is. Paint, paint, paint all day, and then bike. Why torture like that? But then, when she steps into the bathroom, she is suddenly puzzled at how few ceramic tiles on the wall there are: seven across! Yet, when she lays on her back in the bathtub the spread of tiles in front of her eyes seems infinite…. "So obviously limited and so indisputably infinite," Like Totally marvels, "like life itself!