i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

lately I've been thinking about when people talk about authenticity and true vs false self whether there aren't better classification spectrums, such as integrated vs unintegrated, transient vs persistent, reactive/neurotic vs independent.

perhaps if I were better at systematizing, I could give an answer with greater precision. I could chart the many feelings that arise as I am moved to create. this question continues to haunt me. I am so far from knowing my motives

maybe a reason #10 is that it feels nice to do something well, and sometimes I doodle or write because I like that hit of self-satisfaction? #11 it's satisfying to express strong emotions that feel important to me and give them proper space. #12 I wanna actualize an idea i have irl.

#6 is still very real, feels good when people praise me. much of #10 may involve imagined praise or potential future praise.

at the time being, what is your goal with art creation, or even, what is your goal with reblagging art that you like?

the answer i used to give was "so i can represent myself before god".

god is an infinite reservoir into which we can displace our impossible and inchoate wants. to succeed at art is to sharpen and refine our capacity to want. i am sad, and i represent the sadness honestly in a comic, indulge it and give testimony to it; i do this loudly and boldly in hopes that somebody up there notices. in this way the story of my life becomes about, rather than the person who made me sad, the way my sadness looks before the ultimate audience the LORD.

there is a lot that this framing omits, though, a world of objects, mediums, people. art is a social practice, with other selves and hurt feelings resulting from their friction. i have spent maybe most of my early 20s writing about and obsessing over lofty ideas in part to hide from this fact. i think it is maybe about time i take a closer look at the Things of This World.

here is a list of 9 depraved and carnal sub-motives to art-as-performance-before-god... Number 9 Will Shock You!

(sorry i tried making this short but it got very long and pretentious and edgy again)

1. pride in my own genius, in seeing myself AS someone who is driven to create art, someone whose soul has been imbued into many art objects. i have felt this lately looking back on 2017 me: they are a strange and messy creature with sculpey dolls and drugs in the mail and posters of neolithic sculptures on their wall. it feels exhilarating to create while you are riding a wave of inspiration; it feels almost as nice to look back years later and recognize yourself in it. maybe if I make something good enough I would be beautiful forever and never have to make art again?

2. the sympathy of others in seeing my sadness decorated. it felt nice when k told me he cried reading my mahavidya comic. it felt nice for s to appreciate my cat comic. william godfrey said mary wollstonecraft's book was perfectly designed to make him fall in love with her--i have badly wished this to be said about me and the way i externalize myself. I do not like very much how I truly am. someone who loves my art and writing loves me for how i wish to be seen.

3. transmutation of my ugly bits into something powerful and sharp, capable of doing damage, of alienating. i make art to feel like a well-crafted weapon. i feel an immense amount of anger. i hate people when they like me and i hate them when they don't. i hate myself that i care. i don't know what i want but i know who i am. could they ever understand? but i understand, and i make so few concessions for them—watch me not care! are you impressed?

but it's also the opposite of all these things. as drunk as I might get on self-mythologizing, 4. i would still like to always be improving my craft. I would like to prioritize the production and product above the romance of Being The Artist.

and i want sympathy, but not at the expense of honesty; 5. i am trying to get closer to truth undecorated, to a purer and less sensationalized story of my life, one that i can separate from my art and draw from less compulsively.

and 6. please, please, please notice me! i care so much what you think!

so i think in the end it's confusing and i don't know. maybe it's like this--do you know karen horney's 10 neurotic needs? i see a place for art in each of these--

fig 1.1: neurotic needs (note: the dominant partner is the LORD my GOD)

but maybe this isn't really honest either, and it's a lot simpler. all of these things come out when i create art, but when i pull up a page it is just because 7. my friend wants me to draw a picture of her as a skuncc. or 8. i was bored in church and fascinated by the shape of a cat's head. or 9. a ferret is very cute, and so i must draw.

i don't think you should trust very much what i have to say about why i make art.

fig 1.2: human child

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

at the time being, what is your goal with art creation, or even, what is your goal with reblagging art that you like?

the answer i used to give was "so i can represent myself before god".

god is an infinite reservoir into which we can displace our impossible and inchoate wants. to succeed at art is to sharpen and refine our capacity to want. i am sad, and i represent the sadness honestly in a comic, indulge it and give testimony to it; i do this loudly and boldly in hopes that somebody up there notices. in this way the story of my life becomes about, rather than the person who made me sad, the way my sadness looks before the ultimate audience the LORD.

there is a lot that this framing omits, though, a world of objects, mediums, people. art is a social practice, with other selves and hurt feelings resulting from their friction. i have spent maybe most of my early 20s writing about and obsessing over lofty ideas in part to hide from this fact. i think it is maybe about time i take a closer look at the Things of This World.

here is a list of 9 depraved and carnal sub-motives to art-as-performance-before-god... Number 9 Will Shock You!

(sorry i tried making this short but it got very long and pretentious and edgy again)

1. pride in my own genius, in seeing myself AS someone who is driven to create art, someone whose soul has been imbued into many art objects. i have felt this lately looking back on 2017 me: they are a strange and messy creature with sculpey dolls and drugs in the mail and posters of neolithic sculptures on their wall. it feels exhilarating to create while you are riding a wave of inspiration; it feels almost as nice to look back years later and recognize yourself in it. maybe if I make something good enough I would be beautiful forever and never have to make art again?

2. the sympathy of others in seeing my sadness decorated. it felt nice when k told me he cried reading my mahavidya comic. it felt nice for s to appreciate my cat comic. william godfrey said mary wollstonecraft's book was perfectly designed to make him fall in love with her--i have badly wished this to be said about me and the way i externalize myself. I do not like very much how I truly am. someone who loves my art and writing loves me for how i wish to be seen.

3. transmutation of my ugly bits into something powerful and sharp, capable of doing damage, of alienating. i make art to feel like a well-crafted weapon. i feel an immense amount of anger. i hate people when they like me and i hate them when they don't. i hate myself that i care. i don't know what i want but i know who i am. could they ever understand? but i understand, and i make so few concessions for them—watch me not care! are you impressed?

but it's also the opposite of all these things. as drunk as I might get on self-mythologizing, 4. i would still like to always be improving my craft. I would like to prioritize the production and product above the romance of Being The Artist.

and i want sympathy, but not at the expense of honesty; 5. i am trying to get closer to truth undecorated, to a purer and less sensationalized story of my life, one that i can separate from my art and draw from less compulsively.

and 6. please, please, please notice me! i care so much what you think!

so i think in the end it's confusing and i don't know. maybe it's like this--do you know karen horney's 10 neurotic needs? i see a place for art in each of these--

fig 1.1: neurotic needs (note: the dominant partner is the LORD my GOD)

but maybe this isn't really honest either, and it's a lot simpler. all of these things come out when i create art, but when i pull up a page it is just because 7. my friend wants me to draw a picture of her as a skuncc. or 8. i was bored in church and fascinated by the shape of a cat's head. or 9. a ferret is very cute, and so i must draw.

i don't think you should trust very much what i have to say about why i make art.

fig 1.2: human child

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

Did you create Empty Spaces

I sure hope not and now my blog name hits different

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

source

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

Felt

she would do numbers on tumblr.com

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

Hey anyone reading this! What are some things you can point to and credit for your moral development? Specifically what are some things I can grind to become a more virtuous person? Books I can read? Meditation or hypnosis? Volunteering? I'm personally pretty indebted to certain people I look up to, a childhood, seeing the good and bad of a moral community (church), my sociology degree and Tumblr education in ~2011, as well as just Life Experiences, but I'm wondering if I can take actionable steps?

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

Emotional tunnel vision is the first confounding factor, but the second is that the urge to document my life at all, as some act of testimony before the divine watchers, seems to fade (for selves identical to me) around the ages of 27 and 28.

This is the narrative arc: maybe at the age of let's say fifteen the future lays across the sea a great unconquered landmass waiting for you. By the age of 23 you've crashed this great ship and stumbled your way into more than a few dead ends, and these have relieved you of the notion of a Future as the solution to the Present. But up until your late twenties, amidst your talk of cosmic insignificance and transience there's a sort of fire that still burns and makes you proud of your mess of a life. In your smallness, you feel even plucky and blasphemously proud, staring down heaven's eyes like some mouse caught in a clean kitchen. You think, I'd like to create some great and perfect singularity of everything that it means to be human, everything that it means to be me, and then You'd understand, You speaking from Your whirlwind.

By thirty, this fades too. And why is that? Maybe it's that there's a timer that begins counting down when you first take responsibility for yourself as a Real Person and it burns out at the ten-year mark. You've seen too many iterations of yourself, lived too many contradictory moments, followed too many threads to their end. The empty space that allows for romantic speculation has been filled up. At thirty you'd really just like to tell God about burnt out fuses, soft beds and warm meals waiting. The forty years you may still have left to travel signal weight rather than promise, and the most you can hope for is that you've settled into your own flaws and failures enough, bolstered by the love of those around you, to know that you're up for the task of weathering at least a few more decades. (If not, then I hope you find these people and their warmth, sincerely.)

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

I set out tonight to write a yearly review, but it's difficult to remember further back than a month. One thing about living which seems to confound attempts to document it is a sort of emotional tunnel vision, whereby each emotional chapter seems to operate on its own logic. From the inside it's all you can see. The love you have for someone that makes you want to speak in forevers and meetings across lives seems as eternal and self-evident as the pain of the breakup, the simple joys of a successful routine you've fallen into as eternal as the fatigue and heaviness and entropy of depressive slumps. Whatever worlds exist outside seem invisible and alien to us.

Journaling can be helpful in combating this, to some small degree--rereading journals from even a year ago, I'm reminded of how different I was then, and yet what parts of my worldview carry over. The difficulty is forcing myself to reread them periodically. The past can seem so irrelevant to the present, even as the present is eternally reaching out to salvation in its future.

In the absence of these moments of deliberate touching base with the past, the self can feel unmoored and isolated to moments. Lessons get forgotten in the intensity of the now. I haven't really gotten better at this, even after a decade of practice. Crushes are still destabilizing and life-consuming. Being challenged still hurts. Work is still hard and boring, defeatism ever tempting. My way of working around this these days is just to not rely so much on experiential wisdom to impart change, but instead to Be Less Dumb, to watch carefully for what things trip me up, to plan against them. To build routines, use my laziness in my favor, space my physical environment in ways conducive to productivity and virtue. Emotional tunnels are powerful, powerful things that confound all rational attempts to meta them through their own internal logic. You aren't going to change--maybe this is the key to changing.

[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

One more month of military service

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Curiosity

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candle girls ancestor

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this is an animation i did for a song by ivy hollivana! you can listen to it on bandcamp!

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[i-am-a-fan-of-empty-spaces]

wat if we were two porcelain cats drinking milk together