Flow

This is a strange one.

In reading far and wide (a mistake - reading locally - that I've really been addressing) I think I might have found something really cool - a way to integrate the varying degrees of immediacy, rather than claiming the conceptual (and in effect, impossible) ideal above all else.

Think Platonic (as in Plato) forms. If I said 'think of your ideal partner', and you said 'okay', an inherent problem would arise: every real person you met that might be considered companionable would also be compared to this impossible ideal - and never live up to it.

Let's face it. I will never meet a half-Oriental, half-Latina, crazy and rational in equal portions that challenges me and defers to me, that is a total equalitarian and can choose whether she wishes to become pregnant because she has no need for contraceptive devices. She also happens to be independently wealthy, but respects that I might want to earn my own coin. Above all, she only likes what I consider to be excellent music, has an intellect only comparable with a hybrid of Einstein and Dante, and somehow looks exactly like Catherine Zeta-Jones - but sings like Katie Noonan.

Yeah, so that isn't possible. What is possible is finding someone with similar qualities and accepting that what makes this person is not only their oddities, their imperfections, but that, impossible as it may seem, they like you for the same reasons.

Huge digression I know, but honest, and academic investigation seems to function in roughly the same fashion.

Instead of being hell bent to prove my point that 'immediacy is impossible - especially in mixed-media performance', I took a step back.

I drew from philosophy instead. Not new territory, considering I minored in it, but different territory. As I traversed a path from Plato to Levinas (Emmanuel, not Thomas for those in the know) I found some pretty interesting things. It hasn't all sunk in so I'm not going to jump the gun, but there is a thread I'm unravelling - and using to form a new tapestry.

I read Virilio. I laughed (aloud, by myself, in my bedroom) because while much of what he says is accurate, there is no room for optimism. I realised he and I have much in common, and that perhaps I didn't like what I saw in him that was also present in myself.

I read Csikszentmihalyi (try saying it once, let alone ten times fast) and I found something really, really simple and also profound. I think that often the little things (previous post) are the most amazing, but this guy... This guy kind of hit the nail on the head - at least for me.

So many things I've done have given me so much joy, and this is what makes me who (and how) I am. I've been payed to play, physically, musically and circus-wise. I've derived (the first 'e' should have an 'accent acute'). I've spent so much time and effort doing beautiful, inclusive things, and yet set myself a task in the opposite.

What a fool I've been.

The perk of being a fool is, at least you're expected to fail. But the beauty of true foolishness is that fools, jesters, clowns are inherently humble.

I'm an arrogant fool at times, but this is not one of those times.

Special shout out to Neal for telling me not just where I missed, but how to aim better.

Special shout out to Adrian for just knowing it, even if he doesn't know it.

No more hating.

Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.