Notes to My Imaginary Self
Notes to My Imaginary Self is a short selection of “journal entries” of personal yet universal meaning. A top to bottom movement to the center of being pursues communication with elusive aboriginal shadows as well as the necessary angels of radical immanence.
-JG
There is an obvious difference between things as they appear on a two-dimensional surface and how they appear in “reality”. To find out how we see, think, and how we respond on deeper levels, we must look into the mind just how thoughts, memories, and feelings accumulate in the process of knowing. Where does our “reality” take place? Is there another reality hidden behind this one? An array, between sky and pavement, of trembling realities growing at length, and multiplying? Perhaps there is nothing behind these shadows of shadows but the blood’s seasons fading in the brain. No world or actuality in itself. Would we be capable of accessing this vomiting multitude?
We construct language like we build buildings and bridges. Through our multifaceted discourses and methods, individually and communally, the “effects” of language record the breath of our thoughts and the circles of our footsteps. They don’t teach us to see buildings and bridges as an impermanent assembly of non-elements. We certainly don’t want to run into them or have them fall on us. However, we should not overstate this either. We cannot eliminate all mental dualities. Habitual thoughts are not entirely real. The good thing is they rise to the point of vanishing.
Color and space have to do with elementary particles which appear and change. They are held together by the unseen fabric of the universe: the shifting of atoms, molecules, and so forth. They do not exist independently of our sensations. They are mathematically discernable material objects and changes in spatial location.
Dawn’s caution abandoned us to experience the complicated play of the eyes as a certainty assigning each other and things a permanence in this world. It is our collective hallucination, our dear fright, our sadness and happiness.
The moon is not more real than my belief about it. The abstract painting leaning against the studio wall, or the thought of the painting is no less real. The moon, painting, me, you, the world all emerge from the “imagination” with the suddenness of a summer shower or in the delirium of a feverish night. It is the constant quacking of our ego tipsy from salvation’s bottle that looks out at the world. A natural affinity underlying the flesh that is an unfolding particle of time quicker than a sparrow’s glance. And with the weight of gravity like a millstone around the neck.
What others make of the sky I make of my work. In all the trembling rooms it is in the studio that I am the spell-soaked shaman. The one who does not see with the physical eye but by which another eye governs the seeing. Subtler than subtler, a sight endowed with pure appearance like the placing of flowers in a sudden shaft of light.
The self’s other seeing.
Painting is the lathe that shapes my inner life. Painting is umbilical.
It is morning. Mountains still do not breathe. The body unfolds along the length of the bed. Finds its way to the studio to yesterday’s painting. The work begins from where it left off. What does it mean, working day in and day out? With limited possibilities that is sheer impossibility. The places I cannot reach.
Do I, born of flesh and ghosts, view the world as a mortal miracle? Bring aptitude from a far star to find my own color, scent, and fullness?
I unbolt, nightfall- blind, the darkness at the funnel’s very bottom.
Interregnum (To My Wife)
Two minds
a single breath
in the debris of waking life
Whispers
taste of autumn
as the world wears away
Incandescent
behind drawn curtains
two flowers attached to one stem.
The Kotsker Rabbi (d.1859) said:
There is nothing more whole than a broken heart,
and nothing straighter than a crooked ladder.
I say:
The heart breaks and the world falls in.
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