serial documentor

every time i try writing about one things i end up writing about all things...

serial documentor 

“The past is an untroubled, everlasting possession.”

-Seneca

My life is chronicled by a million scraps of paper, miles of digital footprint, notebooks bursting at the seams, and annotations in books I'll likely never pick up again. Traces of everything I’ve ever resonated with are all somewhere, actualized on the physical plane. There seems to be an urgency within me that insists that everything is to be introspected: every utterance of my inner monologue, every conversation, every gesture, every pattern of my own behavior. It’s as if I am preparing for some doomsday amnesia, like there is an impending sense that the erasure of myself is going to happen. Or worse, is happening already, and disintegrating at the hands of  my fallible human memory.

In a technical sense, I suppose this is a perfectly reasonable anxiety. The future is marked with no sense of certainty, with no mercy, with no discrimination from illness or death. The past, however, is embalmed with a degree of certitude no other point in time has the capacity to behold. In the same way ancient texts and artifacts are the main point of reference for historians to infer about the development of humanity, a culmination of the ruins of one’s past are the only means that can lead them in any direction to return back to the conception of themselves. This isn’t to say that perspective on the past or the recollection of events or their context is fixed, but that these shifts are rather events of the present informed by the past. As is all of humanity, antecedent.

The influence of this preserved information transcends its time. Even history that seems so distant to our modern lives holds immeasurable weight on the collective human unconscious. In the story of the healed femur, anthropologist Marget Mead  was asked by a student what she believed to be the first sign of civilization, to which she responded with evidence of a healed femur. Mead explained that most wounded animals in the wild would be hunted and eaten in the face of a debilitating injury before their broken bones could heal. Fossil evidence of  a healed femur proved to Mead that civilization began with empathy, with the wounded who must have received help from others. It is a tale of human nature that posits something other than the individualistic survival of the fittest narrative we’re told over and over again. The symbolism of the healed femur, and its immortalization through Mead’s retelling, is evidence that our universal human experience  and consciousness is  informed by countless inconceivable morsels of ancestral information. 

Contrastingly, in the terrain of our personal consciousness, this evidence of ourselves lies within the confines of an elastic membrane: a hard skull through which only we choose what to relinquish. The ultimate human nature, and the propelling philosophy amongst generations across time, is to somehow interpret this brain activity. Thousands of electro-chemical reactions occur at such volume and complexity within the human brain, and thus every aspect of consciousness. The soul aches and swells, the mind zips in spirals, the body lusts and loathes with spit and fists, and the heart limps, hardens, skips. These are universal experiences, captured in a totality only palatable in our collective documentation of ourselves, in our collective and abstract nature. And as time continues to surpass and sterilize us, we will only continue to trace out patterns in the past. 

It is in art, and in nature, equally ambiguous, wherein lies the meeting point between expressors and expressions. Meaning is assigned, flexible, transcendental. Symbolism and archetypal patterns are omnipresent. There is good reason as to why no one has ever come to a resolve in the debate between what is good art or bad art, on the interpretation of art vs intention of artist. Everything exists conditional to polarity, especially ourselves; fated to be one thing, to embody oneness, and still found to be insatiably oscillating between opposing states. Humans are simultaneously the receivers of the consciousness of others, and the deliverer of their own consciousness. Art as a form of documentation, as an esoteric reflection of the psyche, is the only place where our own egoistic personal consciousness is destined to meet the collective human unconscious. This is what is truly sacred in art:  digestion and indulgence of ourselves in all our abstraction. In the same breath, the same can be said for a waterfall, or a leaf. 

Digital documentation can be considered a similar, although limited physical manifestation of collective human consciousness. The reeling brain is just as rife with overstimulation as the internet is, just as much a place where even minute informational processing never ceases. The trouble is, if one's own thoughts are already so plentiful, the thoughts of others- literally millions of others- is unfathomable. Yet, by this same characteristic, the internet meets art graciously and abundantly in its sheer capacity for the documentation of thought. Since its invention, there has been an unprecedented variation in modes of expression online, each as everlasting as the other. The screen has, although the latter can be argued, interconnected humanity far and wide more than anything ever before. In many ways, the internet has fulfilled its promise of potential to an extreme that is ineffable. 

However, the expanse of the new digital medium reaches a halt, again, when it becomes limited by the common consensus that one should commodify every endeavor. To be an artist is to wear an artist's clothes, and have an artist's music taste, and identify with an artist adjacent popular culture, before it is to be just someone who creates art. Every mode of expression, art or otherwise, is demanded to be profitable and digestible under capitalism, and the internet has only aided in perpetuating this agenda by exponential intervals. 

And worse, even in non-commercial spaces, art is supposed to mean something. It's supposed to be moving and vaguely philosophical. It's supposed to be political, but not too political. Oh, and above all else, those ideas must all be transmuted in a precisely serendipitous way. They can’t seem calculated, but of course they must be.  Art, the now wretched, loaded word, intimidates artists every day out of the simple ritual of sitting down and reveling in beauty for beauty’s sake, making art for art's sake. 

When I  first took up painting last year, I began the practice under the assigned purpose of two things: first, that it would be foremost a sensory pleasure. Painting would be a well intended,  mindful experience of colors and textures and brush strokes. Secondly, and similarly, painting would serve as a means to practice patience and the ritual of looking at things closely, and with devotion to the eye and the intricacies of each thing I painted. This all began with a painting of a leaf I took a photo of, and thought about incessantly until I got the essence of it down somewhere in permanence. The rest of the practice has unraveled naturally, and still surprises me with little expansions each time I sit down and surrender to blankness. It’s not something I’m very good at, It's surely not something I’ll ever make money off of, and it’s certainly not something that earns me the title of  a painter. It does, however, make me an artist. To be an artist is to be a sorcerer of creation and evocation, to translate the human language of thought to the human language of the eye, the mouth, the ears, the hands, the body. As Simone Weil puts it, “Through art [man] recreates the alliance between his body and his soul.” To observe and understand being, man must recreate his metaphysical experiences in a tangible form.  

Writing began to enthrall me at an age when I was far more naive, and far less equipped to assume it without inhibition. The implications of identifying as a writer convoluted the essence of the practice for me. Every word I write is now a dedicated effort to return to that purity. These days,  I find more solace in the words of writers than my own. Even in regards to this essay, Richard Siken’s quote “I’m a writer. I write things down,” says more of what I want to say here than these hundreds of words ever could. Sometimes it feels like if I could memorize every poem I love, and every piece of prose that I’ve ever underlined, I would finally be able to express myself entirely. Although, given my own logic, probably not. There is a frequency that can be found in the words of others that is deeply profound for me. Their relinquishing of themselves, even in a remote sense through other characters and stories, in the vagueness of poetry, is inescapable. A professor once told me that no matter how hard you try to not write yourself into your work, you’ll do it anyway, every time. For me, writing just happens to be my favorite incantation of my own human quintessence, of my own mysticism. The same philosophy goes for anything that you bring into creation, anything that is an expression, even the gestures we forget about. Even washing the dishes. Do it all with intensity or not at all. 

Within the confines of my cerebral echo-chamber, my concept of who I am is perpetual, eternal, and as cyclic as life itself. I regurgitate almost everything I receive and experience back into the material world, and consume it again and again to continue experiencing it as a part of myself, forever. Thankfully, for those lapses in life when I get caught up in the mechanisms of living, and don’t find time to document it somehow, I find comfort in knowing that it’s all still in there somewhere, floating around in my subconscious. That, eventually, even my dreams will inform me of the inner workings of my mind with recurring images of my teeth falling out and of spitting up blood.  

And so, everything that I love most costs very little. Objects of divine creation are the most precious things I have:  letters i never sent out, old photos with my father, journal entries from when I was 10 and thought it couldn’t get much worse, a shitty landscape I painted on magic truffles, every stoned notes app one liner i’ve ever written, voice memos of drunken conversations, a photo of blueberry pancakes that look like a smiley face, drafts of poems from the first time I was falling in love, songs that just have that thing about them, essays i know i’ll die without ever finishing.

How lucky am I to get to spend my whole life getting to know myself so well, and having so much space on this plane of reality to map it all out?