blog.artwells.com

It’s easy to see things as they aren’t.  The older I get, the more I find value in being wrong.  Of course, in most situations it’s important and urgent to be correct, or to withhold opinion.  Every year, though, these situations seem fewer and fewer.

It’s important to know when to brake while driving and to be right about which end of the knife has a point on it and what to say when you’ve upset someone. On and on. But so much of life isn’t that important at all. My brain makes a gazillion little judgements a day that don’t matter to me or anyone else. That over there is a bottle cap. The lyric of that song is “you’ve been tussled”. My foot itches.

When I walk, I see cars and people and streets and sidewalks. Those are important. Nearly all the rest can be wrongly perceived. I was certain that included photo was a worn decal of a dog running. The idea of a dog running so enthusiastically, the idea of a worn decal, the idea of a decal no longer attached to what it was; all of that was a perfect reply to the what my mind was working on when I saw it. I snapped a picture.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t a decal. And it still doesn’t matter that I was wrong.

What I most want to write about, I don’t know how to name.  That leaves pointing and shrugging, I guess.

I’ve spent a lot of my life doing some sort of faithless divination, looking for signs that I know have no meaning and giving them meaning.  In oracula.org, I’ve placed some things based on an nonacademic, unfaithful interpretation of the I-Ching (newwings) and Tarot (refind) and even one based on Ouija (weja–which was pulled after a nastygram from Hasbro).

The exploration that’s changed my life most, though was wingmail. I wrote this nearly every day for about eight years (3000 days). It changed the way I look at everything.

I continue now looking at stuff and trying to read and to force meaning into it all. I’m dabbling in photography based on it. I regularly stop on my daily walks having discovered something simple that had some immediately stunning meaning to me that has no real relation to the thing itself.

So, what do I call that?