It’s been a while

since I’ve updated this last. So let me just update very quickly.

I have not been writing. I’ve been printing, photographing, and working. So the world spins around a bit, and the past week has especially been hectic, productive (in one of those ways where you don’t know what to do with your hands, so you dig in a bit too deep). I play ambient music to ground, but it feels noisy and saturated. Ironically, this entire time, I’ve thought that I cannot watch some of my favorite movies: they are too slow, with too much thinking and feeling, and now I just need to put my head down and be productive (I know this feeling will end; what an awful way to live). 

So I think, before rooting out this feeling, that I should attach some images. I should put a timeline onto my weeks, and finally, as we all do, I need perspective.


There are some images I made; the ones on the left (the one of me and Yashuko Bush taken by Snooze) are from my exhibition on March 3rd, of LGBTQ people: gay and queer men. The rest are printed for fun; testing paper and concepts (shitty camera, sequencing, perspectives, how saturated can matted paper go). The triptych was submitted to an art showing. Thinking of putting things for sale. 

So March Third until now has been a bit of a blur.


I think of some mystical terms, along a mystical path from a Sufi book I read five years ago. And two notable terms, used as if they were scientific, were “expansion” and “contraction.” These reflected inner states, supposedly. I have no idea what the author meant, so I put the book away five years ago and have not returned to it. But for the past few weeks, after a fever-dream encounter of trying to buy paint chips at a car paint store, I’ve returned to these words. I may be attempting a new reading, but I’ll try to explain...

...how, as an interior state, I felt “contracted,” as if the scope of my life narrowed, as if I could get things done, feeling completely and incontestably like myself, passionate with no foresight, when (as has been the case for the past couple weeks) I focus creatively, not reading much, and not feeling too social. The astrology app says this is normal. Bundle of emotions, and passion, going and going and going. Photographically, this means I can print and print and shoot and shoot, but I might teeter on burning out. I could fall in love, too, by the way. 

Expansion is the feeling of looking at clouds. They come. They go. That’s it. Empty.

So I’ve dug into my archive (before last week), printed (last week, this week, etc.) worked and bought another camera, worked and printed and submitted to an art show, and have lost my bearings. It’s a bit Bataillian, unintended, no concept, like life is there and I am living like an unthinking animal--or is it machine--and I’m caught up in this sort of work season.

It’s scary and feels like risk to have the time to think, to conceptualize, to work on a problem, to think bigger than myself. To feel expansive instead of whatever feels blind and intuitive. I feel like I need to listen (hence ambient music) with an open heart and mind.

I listened to Krista Tippet speak to Justin Vernon today, while I was working at church. And it made me realize how silly my church job is. Justin Vernon talked about how he’s come back to the word “God,” as if it’s the only one that encapsulates a certain discourse, or the only way you can talk about the transcendent. It reminds me of what the pastor says, and a certain argument in religious studies. But Justin moved on from that, and both Justin and Krista are vulnerable, and Justin made me wonder about a vulnerability that is not confessional, not linked to wrongness or sadness or badness. A vulnerability, an opening up, to what (why close off in the first place)? Vulnerable to be aspirational, naïve, vulnerable to dream and think of a bigger life. Expansive. 


If there is only one thing I remember from this entry, it is that those who are thoughtful must feel. And those who feel must be thoughtful if they are to feel themselves in a world around them. Susan Sontag (I finished one of those books in March...another thing in that blackout season of post-exhibition life) says something similar: thinkers aren’t killers. Thinking is feeling’s mileage, its longevity. Thinking is feeling’s memory.