Reality Theaters

Along with free speech is the important aspect of allowing people to see things the way they do. That is to open up the mind instead of inform it, and box it, with a neat little label. This is one of the reasons I appreciate the visual and sensorial realm more than the often coined nature of text or commodity market sloganeering playing upon the way words can be read, interpreted and digested in several ways. I see it as a responsibility when creating something to be ultra-careful to knowing this will affect someone topographically as well as tomographically. Sure, there is a superficiality to a flat plane, a screen, or the face-value of any thing. The reality I have experienced from life is always deeper and more peculiar. I believe, and could be wrong of course, is that everything does penetrate us deeply. I’m not wanting to incite the victim mentality of the often written about subliminal programming here. I write today assuming you are intelligent, or are at least sharing with me in the attempt to find out new understandings. And while the thingliness of understandings can become a bit Platonic in the mind please note, if the cultural references feel like I’m not speaking to you… I am. So many times I have to look up things when I read, this extra action is not a given nor taken for granted but rather simply encouraged here on Le Lapin. The responsibility on readers seems only higher as verifying structures and knowledge sources become re construed with the internet. It’s not as if a new mind is being born but that new subconscious is emerging through the mentalisation. Depending on the type and source of stimulus I wonder how many people ask themselves: do I look that thing up, do I verify that source, do I go check that out to make sure it’s accurate or not? The internet, like capitalism, has become a convenient alibi for both risk avoidance and risk taking. I’m not here to pathologize risk taking either, I had thought the age of the internet would have made people more cooperative, interested, agile and playful: but I have experienced quite the opposite. There is a growing and overwhelming need to shut-it-off. My friend, Francesco, pointed out: A.I. is great at a first draft, but the real work is in the revision. That is where he descried the art, not artifice, is made. I appreciate this perspective a great deal. In terms of rigor and tradition, such as any cultural artifact that has been passed through generations instead of landed in a garbage heap, I fear a great deal of art made today might be worth doing again, or at least looking at again and again to see what was missed. This looking again quality was something Richard ascribed to the Melodi series. At first it seems like nothing. Over time something starts to happen. This slow emergence is something I have a personal faith in. Because I have not had faith in something anyone told me to do, or told me to believe; and I have been told by former friends very loudly: BELIEVE! BELIEVE! IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND; SO JUST BELIEVE! If this was the case, everyone could think themselves into the life they want to live. The thing is, if anything actually worked like that, you run the risk of becoming a puppet to someone else’s designs or image via having your free-will hijacked or subtlety denying your personal choice to cohere with someone for the sake of the relationship, friendship, collegiate, professional, personal, or otherwise. This fear-based behavior I can empathize with well as it can take so many years to build up enough internal pressure to pursue one’s internal desires to raise a personal view instead of a tribal or group belief into a conversational context. This "personal voice” can quiet itself in the presence of cancel-culture or even a family or social group. I remember jumping into grad school feeling like jumping out of an airplane into the Pacific. For one, I’m afraid of heights, and two I prefer ground transit despite always wanting flying cars to become real. In retrospect, I did not let myself feel how terrified I was until after, because now I realize I’m in way over my head; this subjective feeling of liberated letting go and opening up to see what life outside of the Modernistic box offer, I can still cling to, though I try to in lesser degrees now. In an landmark experience in Paris, I recall people hating the Montparnasse monolith I loved because it helped me locate myself in an unknown place. Indeed, the modernist structure did not fit in with the rest of the detailed and weathered beauty. As the essence of a particular worldview of life: life being about learning versus lessons. Such a small difference has been a huge space making conceptual tool: to make life is about lessons has been to lessen the “I” of notions, creating more breathing room and less mind-weight. The fun and sometimes painful challenge of this view is the insistence on an “I,” or social demand for an ego to navigate the world with. Yes, there is someone home…an essence within, but what is that could be easily condemned or damned or stuck if forced to become containable or obtainable. This is why people cannot morally be trapped or owned by anyone. And while we know this, people still engage in this behavior all the time, buying books on how to trap a mate, or how to win likes or be influential. It all makes me gag for fresh air! The deep lesson-ing in unconscious behavior pattern recognition based on a social and culturally constructed ideal were seriously reformed after moving to Scandinavia. The situation was not a product of my childhood traumas as the internet psychology would make people believe, and the things people say I cannot nod along with. Becoming a bobble head for the sake of social cohesion seems riskier than remaining neutral: though that embodiment can often incite exclusion from insecure groups or individuals. Of course people want to know what they are dealing with when faced with another human who is both animal and supposed to be exercising some free-will. What people are capable of can be wonderful and horrific…and I mean that objectively. There are certain observable behaviors that seem to be, albeit ascribed from theological texts, to be accepted as true and good. Then there are the spiritual warriors that assert mind over all emotional and physical matters, as higher beings. The risk of that latter group, who are not always in cults, not always into new age, is the denial of the body. I feel that this is what has given rise to yoga workshops throughout the world. As much as I love exercise, I do tend to think in a Western way that every single body ought to decide for themselves what form they want to take on. This is a very self-fulfilling idea that would not fly in collectivist or tribal societies expecting certain people to look, behave, or be a certain way. The internet, as David Ulansey offered, has been perhaps the most significant influencing change in human’s experience of life (today). The internet made it possible for us to become aware of the odd range and depth of synchronicities our separate lives shared. We had never been aware of each others’ existence, nor a shared and specific idea to create wooden plaques of "truisms” that have their opposite written in Latin. Our modern art project might seem like we should hide it until it became public or finished. And while sure someone could lift this idea, the thing is most ideas, as the state of photography and A.I. show us, already exists. Therefore, the details of the project make it art in a playful way. The potential for invention then comes not from knowing, or God-complexes that seem to reinforce themselves as too often common in artists throughout histories, but collaborations inviting a remembering of the creativity of the curious mind, children inhabit. So while the Internet constructs a grand archive and record of human activity, the one t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe