purge/glut

back again

pretty good, that makes two posts in as many days! errrr.....

well, after writing all that introspective shit yesterday; i got told the same as i wrote, pretty much, by someone else on my course. this is someone whose opinion i respect a lot. she added the adjective "narcissistic", and said that i hid behind cynicism and irony in order to avoid committing (to the course, or anything else). narcissistic stung, but i didn't disagree with what she was saying, and thinking about it now, my post was close enough to that. the act of posting all that was close enough. this stuff all arose from the situation with my team mate. i haven't been walking round polling people's opinions of me - it just feels like people have been happily volunteering them. what is it about me at the moment that makes people feel they can just do that?

so she slagged off the cynicism and irony thing, then said that it stops you having faith. saying that she sticks in life to "love and faith". i thought that was lovely. she was saying that i was preventing myself loving what i do, and that without love, you cant have faith (again, in what you do? or yourself? not sure). this was pretty touching to me, because i used to say that i believed very strongly in those two things, those exact words. i defined faith as the act of saying "i know that the world might very well not be as i see it, but i am still going to act as if it is". it is a moral thing, because it's saying "the world should be this way, therefore i am acting this way". love certainly goes along with faith, the two are very likely inextricable. the two must differ in some way- it would be hard to have love without faith, can you have faith without love? i think that is possible.

it feels a bit like it's open season on me. no doubt this will pass, though.

well, i'm back again.

been completely sucked in by big brother again! this year is fascinating. they have selected some of the most self obsessed vacuous wastes of space this year. my usual gripe about false consciousness, the idiots imagining that they are taking part in some sort of team effort, does not apply this year. they are incapable of team work, or considering others. they are simply thinking of their 15 minutes on leaving the house, and are more conscious of the cameras than any previous lot, even to the point of doing something remarkably cretinous and saying to each other "this'll make great telly!". fuckwits.

the house has split into two groups as of last night. previously there was one coherent group and numerous floaters/subgroups. there are three "secret" housemates being incarcerated seperate from the house prior to being whittled down to two somehow and allowed in. one of the housemates is acting as their jailer, bringing them food and clothes, when she can. she is taking the opportunity to recruit them into her group. they may very well begin to resent her. i think that they are beginning to hate each other, they are in a small windowless room with each other for 24 hours a day, and have to do a week of this. their entry will certainly upset the power balance in the house, one way or another.

my already enlarged misanthropy gland is getting much stimulation.

ah, but what have i been doing apart from watching this screeching moronathon? trying not to think of a whole load of stuff, to tell the truth.

solipsism alert!! (skip this if self-indulgent navel gazing or the confessional style is not your thing, i don't blame you)

i've been struggling with the public art course, i have the feeling that it's not for me. i can do the art bit, and run the workshops, but the admin side i admit i just can't face. to tell you the truth it scares me, and provokes stupidly strong feelings of revulsion. the course requires us to fit in with the working practices of the charity running the course. it has protocols and approved ways of doing things, i just don't like it.

also, we have to work in teams. i wanted to find out if i could do this. i think that i've found out i can't.

one of my team mates is a paraniod control freak, but also a lot better at being "professional" than me. i get freaked out and disgusted by that shit. i don't know why, i think it's that it makes me feel inadequate to the job. i think it's meant to make others feel inadequate.

anyway, she says that i have been negative about the project all along.....maybe this is true, i don't know;

she also says that i have been trying to sabotage it....i know that this is not true.

she has said all the things about me not wanting to fit in with "normal" life, and institutions etc. that i have heard a lot from my ex-girlfriend when i was working with her, and since. i'm starting to wonder if this is true, and that i just can't.

my other team mate, who is a really nice bloke and loads less awkward and mouthy than me said this about himself when we were talking about this. "i'm fourty fucking one, and i've got a kid on the way; and i've never in my life done things properly, or by the rules. and look at me- i've got fuck all for it mate. and you can say it's all society's....whatever, whatever.... but i'm really starting to think that it's me."

i found myself agreeing with him. my control freak team mate (who used to work for new labour- which says a lot), the institution that we are training with, and working for, who work to recreate public spaces according to their own template; i think that they probably have something right that i have got terribly wrong.

both "professional" discourse, and re-branding public spaces are ways of setting up protocols in which people can feel there is a shared language. however bland, that there is a predictable platform on which to meet, and communicate. it is certainly arguable that the structure of the platform shapes the discourse, and one can question the motivations of the builders (as i do, frequently) but without a platform there is no discourse, there are monologues, mirrors.

i have refused a lot of these structures, some of these are things like work, money, small talk(?), sobriety, travel/holidays, a certain type of careerism....i'm sure that there's plenty more, and some of those in the list might seem spurious. however, the general gist is that i have refused these things.

increasingly, i have the feeling that my 30's have been spent living with the consequences of my 20's- a debt, literal and metaphorical. it would be good to think that i never had a choice, that is to say, i never made bad choices because i had no opportunity to choose. that would suggest that i have such a thing as a "nature"; this is something that i've always been sceptical of, believing that no one has. they just have circumstances, which condition the choices available. if there are enough pressing circumstances, and we all have them all the time, then something like consistency is achieved, and we can call that a nature. circumstances will reinforce certain behaviours, which in turn promote those same circumstances - and so around again. that would be called a spiral, i suppose, and i think that is what everyone does. it is just that some become more narrow than others.

so what was i trying to say? suppose that i've been attempting to convince myself that it's not me, or i didn't make those decisions, or society is to blame. these are all true to some extent. to some extent. but then, if i did- if i have deliberately turned down chances of gainful employment/mortgages/cohabitation/children/success/prosperity.....if that is what i did, and it's true what people have said to me, that i just can't fit in, what have i been "saving myself" for? it could be an unwillingness to grow up, take on responsibility, fear of failure so reluctance to risk trying......or there is something else that some part of me knows that i should be doing. that would be a vocation, then.

i feel like i have been groping to find the shape of something, this will be something i can hold onto-other handholds being abandoned or rejected. possibly the search -the reaching out and hands sculpting air- is in itself what gives this form.

it's pathetic on a few levels, but the royal college thing feels like a vindication. really, i shouldn't care about that sort of vindication, but it's come at a suitable time, when i feel like i've painted myself into a corner. maybe i had to do that (i think that is what i'll tell myself anyway). maybe what myself and others have seen as drift and apathy has been a commitment, to something else. not to the MA in itself, but to what that represents. it represents the idea that i haven't been wasting my time. i know that i'm likely to be in there with a load of ambitious know-nothing rich kids who feel that they've arrived because they have that crest on their certificate. i feel the same, maybe, for different reasons. though i'm not naive enough to believe that i've arrived anywhere, or possibly ever will.

this is very kind hindsight. mid-life stuff. trying to arrange everything in the most benign pattern i can. on my course they've been telling us that to sell a project (say, an urban regeneration project), or to sell ourselves as artists, we have to have a compelling story. i suppose the perfect example of this is beuys and his plane crash, then the nomads with the fat and felt.

http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm for a short biography of beuys

the whole thing about a story is attractive. it is a good marketing tool. it also (if i could manage to believe it myself) would help me personally. i have wanted to believe that procrastination, boredom, denial, distraction all served a function. that is to say that the components of my life (or my attitude to my life) made sense.