#sketching is usually easy and fun.. coloring is OK. its the detailing that gets to me :(

[lixuii]

i think that i could take commissions in the future and then get humbled so quickly

[youswiminmywater]

learning humanity from a pile of rocks

hello! i know i haven’t written in a long time, at least not here on tumblr, though i’m almost certain there isn’t anybody left that reads what i write here anyway, so this is mostly for my own benefit. writing on a keyboard just allows for me to get everything out a little quicker before i lose the thought entirely. i hope this doesn’t disturb anyone’s dashboard too much (i tend to write quite a bit when i do), but then again, i’m not all that concerned about that.

i’ve been thinking a lot about art lately, which, i understand, is a totally pretentious way to begin any conversation. it’s just been sparked by my bothering to pick up a book and read again, something that always helps me crawl out of periods of depression and sluggishness. it’s a form of self-care, really, and not something that people normally think of as self-care. sort of like how cleaning your room can make you feel better; giving your space to think about something other than your own life can, weirdly enough, make you feel a lot better about your life. oftentimes the best ways to care for yourself are doing things like this, doing things that don’t cost any money and just make you Feel Good, period. and then continue to Feel Good afterward, things that don’t have a bad aftertaste. cleaning your room is always a good example, it fixes a problem that you had and holds the promise of continuing to be fixed as long as you work at it, or at least vow to do it again in the future. 

anyway, i’m already getting away from my idea! so i’ve been reading plays, namely edward albee, because he’s my favorite playwright, and plays are, well, not easy to digest, but generally short enough to consume without losing your attention. and when reading a play, i might stop and go to the back of the book to see the sketches of the stage, and then try to imagine what it would look like to see the play performed, imagine the impact of where the actors are standing or how the set was designed. and then from THIS i might go online and try to find a video of the production, or at least a clip or a trailer or something, or i might go to the wikipedia and see what the playwright said about the play, or what the critics said, or what awards it won (or didn’t win), and yada yada, i go down a rabbit hole, right? and then i end up watching a video of the playwright just being interviewed at a college talking about whatever, creativity or writing or their opinions on other playwrights, and it just gets me more and more interested in learning about that world. same process could happen with anything! you could watch a video about sharpening knives and want to learn about that, or listen to a podcast about people talking about, i don’t know, sawing wood, and realize that there’s a lot more to sawing than you initially thought.

simply put, you’re exercising your ability to learn. not to be a parrot (thought there is some value in that, too), but in this talk albee said something to the effect of, the point of formal education is to teach you how to learn about things after the formal education is over and done with. which does make sense to me, and i get a lot of enjoyment out of learning, and a find a lot of personal value in it as well. it makes me feel like i’m growing as a person, and feeling like you’re growing, or working towards something, is what helps drag you out of dark periods of your life where you feel like you’re stupid, you’re nothing, you’re not producing anything of value or doing anything important. essentially wasting your life. there’s always an opportunity to climb out of it, maybe not forever, maybe not for very long, but it can be done, and it can be done quite easily.

i remember when i was in high school, we had one class called “theory of knowledge,” which i found to be a very interesting class. it was part of the IB program (international baccalaureate), which was kind of like AP i think, in which at the end, they’d test you on various things and then ship off your answers to sweden or the netherlands or somewhere and have an examiner there grade your work. well, on one such occasion, one of the examiners was in our theory of knowledge class giving a lecture about ART, or rather, guiding a classroom discussion about ART. just the basic, age-old questions What is Art? What Can Be Art? What Can Art Be? stuff like that. and it was a fun class that i still remember because it went on and on, everybody’s opinion could be challenged and we basically reached no conclusion. so it’s something i think about, from time to time, whenever i get an idea about what the conclusion could be. my answer is usually always different, and usually informed by something i had just experienced, but i don’t know how often i’ve written it down. 

anyway, on this edward albee interview video, there’s a comment that goes like this:

“ It's sad to see there's so few views of this. A cat sneezing gets 10 million views, this is partly what's wrong with people today.”

followed by:

“oh you nailed it!”

firstly, i think it’s kind of fun to read the second comment as sarcastic, though it probably wasn’t intended to be. a lot of albee’s interview revolved around being very precise and exact in your writing, all the way down to the punctuation, because it gives a different meaning when said or performed aloud. “oh you nailed it!” sounds very chandler-y, while “oh, you nailed it!” sounds more sincere, to me at least, maybe because the second one is closer to being correct english, i don’t know. even still, “oh you nailed it!” sounds even more sarcastic, but perhaps that’s just my perception. secondly, i, forever being a devil’s advocate (and an often intolerable stinker), read the first comment and wanted to challenge it a little bit, at least to myself. you see this kind of comment a lot on academic videos.

so, say you watch a video of a cat sneezing on youtube. what have you done, what has happened? it was funny, it was cute, you laughed, maybe you showed it someone else, or mentioned it at work a month later or had a period of deja vu when you saw a cat sneeze in real life. whatever. maybe you watched it a few more times and it was still funny, cute. maybe you watched it later and it wasn’t really that great anymore, lost its value. its life cycle ends at that point and you move on from it, and you likely didn’t change much from it. maybe it cheered you up or something, but even that fades away as life goes on, it’s just like a bodily function in your brain.

ok, so say you take this video of a cat sneezing on youtube and you show it to a classroom of film/visual media students. now it has been repurposed, hasn’t it? maybe now you show the video and you start dissecting it, you look at the setting, the way it was filmed, the timing of the comedy, the type of cat, the age of the cat, the length of the video, and you basically use it as a teaching device. you get other people thinking about it in a way that they wouldn’t normally think about it if they had just found it out on their own in a vacuum. and by doing this, you’re allowing someone’s perceptions to be altered, you’re making them conscious of something of which they were not previously conscious. 

i think that this is what Art Is, if i may be bold, and it goes hand in hand with teaching. that is to say, probably anything CAN be art, but it’s not always art in every scenario. if it lives and dies and doesn’t change anything in anyone, it’s wasted (which, now thinking about it, might not even be the case in the first situation i detailed, lol). it’s a hard concept to define, as usual. but this is the basis of a lot of Modern art, isn’t it? like, especially the art that people don’t really consider to be art. like if someone just piles up a bunch of rocks and then puts it into an art gallery. a lot of people look at it and go “that’s not art, that’s stupid, my kid could do that, i’m being tricked, this whole thing is a farce” etc etc. it’s not necessarily the piling up of rocks that IS the art, it’s the act of putting it into another setting that makes it art, “elevates it,” so to speak. while some people are going “that’s not art,” there will be other people who are thinking “surely it is, though?” and will start examining it more thoroughly to find a hidden meaning. they’ll think about details, about why the rocks were laid out in precisely the way that they were, the color of the rocks, how they were on display in the gallery, what the NAME of the piece is...maybe they’ll even go so far as to read the plaque or google the artist or talk to the artist, if they’re present, and try to make sense of it. maybe they’ll learn something or see something or pay attention to something they previously didn’t, and maybe they won’t. this is the way even a pile of rocks can become art. you can call it trickery, i suppose, but...i don’t know, i feel like this invites people to take this sensibility with them OUT of the gallery and examine other things in the same way. it is essentially teaching you a new way to think about ordinary objects in everyday life that you might not have known about, might not have practiced, and that’s where the art is. in the teaching how to learn. you can even apply this idea to things like how we judge other people, strangers, or the people we know and love. teach us to pay attention to people in different ways and be more compassionate, or at least more attentive to who they are and what they want. can a pile of rocks make people more compassionate? sure, why not. it all depends on perception too, and how deep into the rabbit hole you’re willing to go, and whether you end up anywhere that actually has any use or value anyway...

i’ve been thinking about this concept in respect to my own relationships, both the idea of learning compassion, and the idea of gleaning knowledge or growing from being around other people. i think i’m getting into kind of a heady space about something that already exists in simpler terms; for instance, i see posts on instagram all the time of people saying things like “if someone in your life is bad for you, cut them out. don’t waste your time on toxic people, don’t waste your time on toxic thoughts, do what makes you fulfilled and happy.” things of this nature, which are things that just make sense instinctively. i’m admittedly not that great at cutting people out of my life, and sometimes of even recognizing when people need to be cut out, and sometimes of even agreeing with the notion that people should be cut out at all. part of me believes that you shouldn’t ever give up on anybody, unless they’re very actively and obviously tearing down your self-worth or impeding your life as a whole. but this doesn’t really address something like a friend that just doesn’t make the cut anymore; it’s really a gray area, and kind of a moral dilemma. when is it right to cut someone out for being just so-so?

oftentimes, i’ll approach doing something with someone else like this: if we experienced something together, spent time together, and it brought us closer together in some way, it was worth it. it being time. even if the thing we did had no, let’s say, persisting value, like if we’re just consuming mindless media together, it’s still WORTH something because it added to our friendship. the thing we did is not the important part (the pile of rocks), it’s the fact that we spent time together that matters. it demonstrates that we care enough about each other to put aside time for one another, something that is very previous, and help each other de-stress or just socialize and feel like a Normal person that makes the whole thing Worth It. and in this process, it can sometimes go even deeper than that, like if you’re having an interesting conversation or helping someone process emotions or something, but i won’t go into all of that.

i find that one of the worst feelings, though, with this in mind, is hanging out with someone, communicating with someone, and feeling like it was a waste of time. like the thing itself had no value, and the act of doing the thing with someone else also had no value. i usually characterize this as “feeling lonely even when you’re not lonely.” getting the feeling that you’ve wasted your time with someone after being with them not only feels bad for the loneliness, but also because it feels like a very cold and Calloused™ way of thinking about other people. even writing about it makes me feel like i must dissociate with people all the time, just the fact that i sometimes think this way about people. i don’t know if it’s the right way to think about relationships or if i’m totally off the path and just overthinking, as i often do. i think i’m just trying to make sense of why i feel lonely in certain scenarios, or why i might get upset and lash out at people when they don’t see anything that should be wrong. the idea that you’re getting nothing out of your relationship is a very tough pill to swallow, and an even harder idea to make an acting decision on. 

but, it’s just been something i’ve been thinking about. i generally think of myself as an optimist, so even when i do think about things this way, my instinct is to say “surely this isn’t the right way to go about it. try looking at it from a different angle and maybe you won’t be so dissatisfied with some of the relationships you’ve put so much time into.” that’s another thing too, the idea that putting time into a relationship means it should pay off in some way. ugh, another ugly thought, something that i don’t even want to touch on right now. maybe it is indeed just a problem of perception, like a lot of things are, outlook. you probably never stop learning how to take care of yourself, or how to be a good person. it’s tough, man.