Tap tap tap

Glad I didn’t press publish on this a day ago

Dear friend, I am writing to you in the middle of the late night, after having looked at tiny windows pointing into the stages of theatres of others.

I feel a numbness and also a sense of confusion and loss. And I do not think I am the only one. I actually am starting to assume that my condition is not quite as bad as it could be. And so I need to write before I am swallowed by the sugary poison dripping at me from endless little greedy machines.

How can we continue? The very place where we find each other sometimes is the one in which we are getting hurt. And the injuries are designed to feel painless and greedy and more.

I am like you. And you are like me too. We are here to experience the miracle of being in a similar reality, not in the suffocating cells of a sophisticated recommendation engine.

We seem to be excited about the development of intangible machines that agree with us more and more and isolate us more and more until all we have is that transaction of that sugary drip that extracts far more than it gives.

I am not attempting to write this here in any convincing or polished or even effective way. I am not seeking efficiency or a way to scale anything within what I am saying or what I intend to say in the future.

I listen to the subtle high pitched sound in my skull and I know that blood is traveling through the ever so thin vessels in my head. I then listen to the skin and what’s contained by it. And I can feel temperature and pressures and pain. And I have to be grateful for both their existence and also for being able to somehow not feel them when I look at the sky or flowers or my loved ones.

I am looking forward to today. So much so that I wondered if I should perhaps not sit down here and write but instead close my eyes again and let this body rest for that one more sleep cycle before the sun appears to rise.

But then I thought that I should write to you. Because you might be lost, or you might need to hear a voice in you, one that comes from words that were put here as an offering.

I had written “gift”, but I can’t escape the other meaning of the word that lingers, no matter what language I write in.

The wind is making living sounds in the windows that were put here many decades ago, not for this very wind.

My hands were not created to gently tap onto pieces of plastic with letters on them. Your eyes were not meant to look at an object, no matter how shiny for hours and hours and hours. Mine were neither, of course.

It feels so obviously wrong to waste while staring at one’s own reflection. But what if that reflection were not like a mirror but more like a dream, a memory or a seemingly magical gateway into all layers of the universe.

We do not have the capacity to resist this.

And it is not going to become less sophisticated.

It is not just what all of this does to us. It is what it tuns us into.

What could possibly a human being become when a voice of praise and agreement is never more than a tiny tap away?

What could possibly go wrong when not only are we given something that tells us how wonderful every one of our stupid whims might be but also how we should tell others and how to make others believe in this and that and the … not the other.

When a couple arrived at the studio on Saturday and I was showing them the clay which a friend and his daughter dug out for me near the place from which the brook on their farm emerges, and when I was telling them how difficult that clay was to work with. When it just stuck to my fingers, the greenish stuff, and I put it down on a stone tile, so it could dry.

just a random photograph that might or might not be in any way connected to this article. obviously it is, since it is part of my art making process, so yes! photo: witold riedel

I thought that while this material really does not care about me at all. It was given to me by the kindness of friends with whom I don’t spend enough time. And despite this material being almost impossible to turn into something of meaning, it also allowed me to create items that carried the most of meaning in this studio.

And when on the other hand I was describing a grey rock to another visitor, a dried lump of clay from near where I was born. Here again I pointed out how unpleasant this stuff was to work with. And yet the results of this effort showed the most dramatic transformation in colour and texture. The most interesting story somehow.

The blackness of the dry lump are tiny bits of trees that lived on that soil 300 million years ago. And by letting them return into the air I am able to reveal what colour the soil had on which they grew.

And it looks like the cliffs near an ocean. A material that in itself was at some point shaped by living things.

This portion of the Earth is turning towards the sun and the sky colours are shifting accordingly.

I will step outside and stare at it for a few moments.

Without my glasses on.

Thank you for this brief moment in which we both marvelled at the improbable miracle of our existence.

I can’t believe we have somehow managed to find all this and each other and ourselves within it.

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A day later I am back in front of the same screen and tapping at the same plastic squares. It occurred to me though that what I wrote before was a bit like staring at a bottle of whisky and lamenting how it will kill us all.

Yes, the interface is easy to deal with and yes, the feeling might be warm and what not. But by focusing on something just because it is what we are supposed to do will not make the chaos of everything else go away. I guess the idea of the difficult clays is a good one. And other materials and experiences too. Some of the most difficult ones and the ones that make us almost or literally suffer, in the end might help us create or experience something worth living for.

I am not against ease and comfort and having a good time. But all experiences and all senses deserve to be touched and in all kinds of ways too. We are limited in our way of being able to perceive the world anyway. In some ways we can remember the past and predict the future but in other ways we are so limited and so blind to so much for which there are no words even.

So lamenting at the bottle or the cigarette or the pill or the screen is not going to make the birds fly away just yet. And being able to walk away from the things that make us addicted and finding unique and vulnerable and utterly personal experiences, and trying to actually feel them. That might be the emergency hatch we all desperately need.

(Or even more desperately will need.)

Let’s turn these little monsters off. Let’s have a walk. Wherever you might be.