open me carefully

do you ever think about never moving? trees and roots. how emily dickinson lived most all of her life in the house in which she was born. peering out her window, in white dresses, they say. do you have to move to be lost, or. to always know where you're going. the dream of an elsewhere. then, finding difference everywhere. interior movement. the depth inside, the complexity. stagnant water. a voluntary trap. being content. faust: if ever i'm satisfied...

or, the thing of being unfinished. continuation, reproduction, pauses. pascal and his scraps of paper, sheets filled with words in all different directions. dickinson and her attempt to organise her poetry, fascicles. how leonardo da vinci would return to a painting two weeks later. tweak, refine. corrent, revision, error. an addition. this expanse of thought, of possible thoughts, that's. not unapproachable, but, impossible to grasp entirely, to turn around in our hands? the attempt from multiple angles

could i be happy with a small life?

i must go in, for the fog is rising

kant on trees

'In the same way, trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight--whereas those which put out branches at will, in freedom and in isolation from others, grow stunted, bent and twisted.'

trees: roots, trunk and branches

so yesterday started with a four hour philosophy essay on "can one claim that the artist creates another world?" and ended with me drunk after two (strong!) cocktails--one of which was called "screaming orgasm", a rather stupid drinking game involving dice, in front of palais tokyo watching kids play with fire and chains, and talking to this guy, about random things, taking a step backwards and falling into a tiny square of water, decorative but deep. still rather drunk, of course, and it's after midnight. not more than forty or fifty degrees outside. windy. taking off my jacket (soaked), my sweater (soaked), wringing out my socks (soaked), this guy giving me his coat. by the swinging lights of the fire. suzanne: your pants! you should take off your pants! people telling me that i was going to die from the cold. me going, no no i'm okay. apologizing. maureen: we're going home. this is with some french kids, by the way, friends of a girl suzanne has met in one of her classes. maureen carrying my sweater and jacket. dripping in the metro. afterwards, in the foyer, i stumble around in my room, try to lay out everything so they'll dry, take a shower and worry for a brief moment after knocking over my shampoo that i'm going fall. maureen makes a cheese omelette and maureen suzanne and i all sit in the kitchen eating, a baguette with chevre, nutella, eggs.

"a pretty learning process": wonderful. i wanted to talk about these trees, how different they are from the kinds i've seen before. how those bundles on that row of trees are not bird nests. the gnarliness, or the delicate. how those trees lined up against the brick wall had to manipulated. the human attention, the pliable wood. growth in the direction that another gives you. my dad once asking me if there are more trees in the world or humans.

but back to homeless thoughts, from before. my philo prof was talking the other day about how only vision and audition were/are the senses for the arts, because they're the only ones linked to human imagination. can you imagine a texture you've never felt before? a scent you've never smelled? and when, say, you imagine the painting you're working on in its finished state, do you really imagine if as if it were real? vivid? textured? colored? or is it the idea of these things, the effect that you have in your head...

now, going to make crepes.


or, sort of. 

and they separate the entries! 

so. kind of annoying that i must have a caption to publish 

interesting trees. is this caption for all the photos or just this one in display? 

it is the gesture, the hand inscribing its trace

wallhanging, originally uploaded by jkeenan.

learning to sew. that wallhanging i kept talking to you about during break: a color study, or something. might i remind you, though, that i did everything for this. cut out every square, chose all the fabric, sewed everything together, quilted it, embroidered it. a pretty learning process.

fervent years

the final manifesto from last quarter that you asked to see. maybe it will help with the aesthetics paper? at least to give you an idea of questions to ask me, things to challenge me on...:


The World Has Made Me, and I Remake the World

I am still a child, often overwhelmed by things that grow around me. Birds!: animals to live in the sky. Grass: carpet for the outdoors. Or even horrible things: maggots eating out the eyes of a newborn puppy.

When I see something beautiful, I want to see it over and over--or replicate the experience of it. The horrible things attract me, too: Why do I look at photos of Holocaust concentration camps when I know that they scare me?

There is an attracting strength in polarities. Is it a kinship? I mean, do we recognize a pattern we understand in ourselves?

The world is based on a recurring set of compromises, between good and bad, the grand and the insignificant, animal and the divine. Earth itself is dependent upon the struggle between gravity and nuclear fusion: the stars and planets exist in a delicate state of hydrostatic equilibrium. Nature is a war with rules, built on physical laws that dictate chaos.

And on a smaller scale, I experience my life as an individual. I am always alone with my thoughts; I have never been on a car ride when I wasn't one of the passengers. But I am also aware of my humanity, as another person in a history of many others. I feel both these things at once, and they are not in competition, or, perhaps they are, but neither wins, and it does not feel unnatural.

Great art speaks to both these parts--humanity and the human--simultaneously. I can distinguish between multiple voices, but I understand them as complements.

Great art makes me revere the artist. And when I remember that the artist is a person like me, I feel the power of my own potential to develop complete, self-referential thoughts.

Great art functions dialectically, just as the mind of the artist who creates it, the society that studies it, and the nature that affords its physicality. It synthesizes form and content. It comments on the universal order of things through a specific model.

Yes, our best art is a reflection humans, made by humans. Humans are part of the world, yet also reflective of its patterns. The world is a small universe in a grand universe. I am thinking about the process of thinking and understanding it by engaging in the act of thinking.