blog.artwells.com

I’m looking mostly for provocation to see myself differently. My life has changed a lot lately, and now I need to make even bigger changes. I’m exhausted emotionally and spending most of my time seeing how high and how low the mood swings can go.

I have enough to think about when I walk and though I’m looking, I’m not giving myself the opportunity to see. I snap pictures without really acknowledging what I’m looking at, or thinking about what they mean. After I loose the context and I see them on the screen, I give myself the time then, and I get it, sometimes.

I was listening to Memo From Turner downtown. In between verses a 60s woman walked past and began speaking. I turned to see her among seven or eight bike staples, asking “Is this where I tie up my horse?” Then turning her head upward to ask the clouds threatening rain “IS THIS WHERE I TIE UP MY HORSE?”

(No photo, so here’s a traffic cone.)

I was remembering a time when I meditated a lot, sometimes for most of the day for days in a row. I saw this several blocks later after my mind had already drifted away.

What I had remembered most was that, near the end of my practice of meditation, I had read something about a form of walking meditation. I think what I do is the opposite of that now.

All of photography is a flattening, and that’s probably true of all memory, perception and expression. I lack a lot of skill in photography — I keep my camera on its auto settings. Though I have professional-grade photo manipulation skills and software, I don’t even crop my snapshots, adjust levels, or even brighten/darken, even in the worst cases. They are what I saw or they are deleted.

I wish I could say that I do this as a way of artistically confining my expression, like a poet choosing meter or a musician using only a single octave and key. I just haven’t learned to see yet. At least, I haven’t learned to see well enough to move on to some other level of expression or moment.

I usually photograph flat surfaces, stuff that is already so close to 2D that I needn’t worry at all about how its light will collapse onto the sensor. I see it, I point the camera at it, and I push a button knowing now that about half the time I get what I see on a tidy SD card. When I started that was less than once in a hundred photo. Yay me!

I’m moving on a bit, but I don’t like it. I love this photo, though. It’s a wall, freshly-painted blue, meeting a sidewalk that was poorly masked. It flattened perfectly, deceptively simply. Only by looking closer is the other dimension apparent. On that unseasonably cold morning, with a head full of hate and a yawning spirit, that is what this wall gave me. A fantastic unfolding world, comforting in its smooth complexity.

Most of the inspiration I get from streetfinds can attributed to distraction. I’m thinking about a puzzle or a problem, and am trapping my mind in thinking the same way over and over. Then I start looking around.

Seeing this shoe mark a step on a path in transition helped me realize that what I was thinking about was on a level that would soon end and that I could to step up once and continue, or stand still. The steady climbing I was doing wasn’t going to work.

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.

I’m usually underwhelmed by what others intentionally leave behind for passersby to find. I appreciate it, honestly, and normally not just for the intent. The things people do to impress and inspire, particularly in my neighborhood are lovely, lovely acts and so far better than the advertisements that outnumber them by so many. Nonetheless, I usually don’t have the kind of deer-in-the-headlights feeling I get when the trash just clicks.

That being said, an often tagged wall on a burnt out and inexplicably abandoned electrician’s shop was recently the display for two painted canvases, one with a frame. I imagine there might have been more and the better were taken. I saw this one and froze.  I think there’s a lot going on here that I don’t get, but what nailed it for me was the frame.  How often do I think about framing something that I leave behind?  Should I?

I’ve been taking a hell of a lot of glove pictures.  I can find more than a dozen gloves in a single walk.  I take pictures of about four out of every five I see.  I have thousands of glove pictures.  I find the postures of fallen gloves extremely expressive.  More than any other type of trash I see, they have much to say.

In describing this habit to a friend recently, I recalled when I used to work in direct mail.  Change of address requests were sometimes fulfilled by someone or something placing the correction label on a catalog, and then some postal worker copying the catalog onto cardstock.  I guess the difference in weight made up for the extra labor and materials.  I would get stacks of these cardstock returns mixed in with returned catalogs.  Every twenty or so of these copies had a part of the hand holding the catalog down on the copier glass.  Sometimes it was a fingertip, a chipped nail, a watch band, or sometimes the whole hand hovering in the darkness above image.  I collected those too.  Some of them can be seen in the include nixon treatment.  I did alot of stuff with these hand images: I included them in letters and gifts, left them around my desk and house, scattered them around town.

I haven’t done anything with the glove photos yet.  Any ideas?

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?