late night drive
"you wanna turn on the radio?"
C doesn’t believe that art has to be about the artist at all, or that she has to show up in her art. I was skeptical. Art is about vulnerability, I thought. So I asked if she hides behind the camera, and she gave a sheepish look and said “for sure. It’s common, especially for musicians.”
I told her about how S writes observationally. In a workshop someone once read her poem about me, her dad, and anger. “It sounds like the speaker wanted to get the fuck out of this poem as fast as possible,” they said.
C kept saying over and over, You know what’s inside you. You know what’s true for you. You know what you want. It’s right in front of your face.
And there was this wonderful moment that passed between us where I was like grieving and frustrated by the forgetting. By how much I drift from my true self. And I grieved it and tears sprung to my eyes and I was like fuck, dude, damn. And she said Yeah but that’s just how life it is, don’t fight it. And I was like what if I could accept that and not fight it, but lean into the practices of remembering?
C carries a notebook and pulled it out to catch an idea she had at the counter. That, too, seems to be a process of remembering.
She said, Art is about moments. This conversation is art, the fact that we made it here is art, what we do with our lives, how your and my universes interact is art. And I didn’t get it and I was skeptical. I said, Hmm sounds like everything and nothing. But she also kept saying the word Shapes. All of these shapes interacting.
I feel there’s something to get there. Maybe the thing that connects art as a moment and art as a poem and the forgetting and the remembering is that the sublime is glimpsed in moments. Maybe the sublime can only be glimpsed in moments.
***
I walk through the subway station typing away on my phone writing this hunched over. And I’m a little self conscious because others make eye contact with me and make way for me as I type. So I do this thing where I pick my head up and walk with the phone held out in front of my belly for a bit. In my new posture I see another man doing the same, trying to type away while walking. I feel this rush of connection and kinship with him. We want phones, no matter how bad they are for us. We want them. I wish there was something better.
Later, a phrase popped into my mind that felt right. I want to build technology that is better for our bodies. I want to build technology that doesn’t disconnect us from each other. Can I walk through the subway station and be not-distracted? Will that actually happen?
I’d like to do things slowly, on long timelines. What would I really want to work on for 10 years? C has a dream to build a platform for everyone to share their art and ideas, and her strategy to work towards that includes building it for her current job. Getting paid to test her ideas. She’s not in a rush. She’s ready to work on that 10 years from now.
S, too, is rarely rushed. Her writing will always return to her, and her to it.
I rush myself. I want to play long games, but what I crave is for someone to hand me a game so I can beat it right now. Others are beating games all around me. I’m in a rush, I have FOMO, and I feel like I’m running out of time.
I want to find the game I’ve been playing my whole life. I want to find the secret long game and play it harder. I want to find the buried Jumanji board.
***
I want to start the reading group, the research project for new computing. Maybe the right word isn’t new.
I’d like to set up the research project for New Computing, and share with M that I’m doing so.
And I realize that if I join S.inc and lean into this, and continue to do research with him while staying true to myself and what I want, that’s valuable to M. With all of my opinionation.
I want to stop convincing myself of things. I want to know.
***
