Chaos & Doodles
A collection of thoughts, ideas, and doodles that occupy my mind.
Everything is Connected
I don't really know what's going on most of the time, but somehow things always come into tremendous clarity in retrospect. Nothing makes sense until it is complete. The pieces slowly fall into place until the most beautiful image emerges from the chaos. Life is so haphazard.
​
I think there is something so wonderful about the process of becoming. Slowly chipping away everything that is keeping you from who you are. How clumsy and awkward the whole ordeal of existing is. I like moments where we do not fool ourselves into believing we are anything but a series of events that occurred by happenstance. That the narrative of our lives is not some immutable truth, but a choice to look back and string together all of the disparate parts into the stories we live in.
​
We can look at the world and see chaos, pandemonium, all of the things that seemingly have no relation and, as a consequence, no meaning. What a strange way of seeing. How curious it is that sometimes we choose to believe stories that strip all the magic from the miracle of existence. To choose to turn away from all of the evidence of our own divine orchestration. Every moment, every thought, everything is connected through you. Everything you have loved or hated all leads back to you, but that's a story only you can choose.
Choose wisely.​
​
​​
​
​
​
​
Represented Artist Introduction Books
%20-%20Copy_edited_jp.jpg)
The Dark
What is hidden in the dark will be brought to the light.
.jpeg)
Self Portrait April, 2021
Fear
Rage
Hunger
Death
Madness
Violence
Power
Shame​​
​Desire
Joy
Love
Freedom
Why are we so afraid of the dark?
​
What lies in the unspoken, the unseen, and the unknown?
Human beings fear what we don't understand, it is bred into our bodies. What is unknown is "other" and when our very existence is threatened with the presence of something outside of us, we elicit incredible violence to keep it at bay. It is terrifying to imagine that there are things in the world that might strip us of our most fundamental truths. The logics and patterns that we have used to navigate our whole lives. Perhaps these rhythms we hold onto are ancient, passed down through generations of broken dreams, buried in new bodies each turn of the century. A fear of the dark that has become so primal that it grows indistinguishable from the outline of our own being.
​
We fear what we do not know, but fear is the only thing that has the potential to set us free. All good things live on the side of fear; freedom, joy, and love. We cannot know who we are or fully enjoy the spoils of life until we have delved into the uncertainty of all that could be. Often, we are not who we think we are. The images projected onto us as children that grow into cages of being are seldom as true as they appear. If we are brave enough to stare into the abyss and gaze upon who we truly are, perhaps we may become all that we hope to be.
​
There is no such thing as the dark, not really. What you think is hidden always comes to light. There is only truth. I see you for what you are. The whole world does, too. What is buried is the most resounding and the echoes of your truths will reach even the most obscure corners of existence. And so, we must make beautiful and find love and joy in these cold, dark, spaces too. There is nothing to fear, it's only ever been you.
Meditations on the Dark:
Readings, Movies, and Culture
notes and links available at my personal library
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Our Worst
Robert Sapolsky
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Jung
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolfe
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
The Bell Jar
Slyvia Plath
Madness and Civilization
Michel Foucault
Devilman Crybaby
Masaaki Yuasa
No Longer Human
Osamu Dazai
Persona
Ingmar Bergman
Banana Fish
Akimi Yoshida
Westworld
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Hideaki Anno
What My Bones Know
Stephanie Foo
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges
Dreams and (Un)Reality
What is real?
Reality
Looks can be deceiving. We often take what we see with our own eyes to be truth, never questioning the images that have solidified themselves in the repositories of our mind.
These images, they can feel so clear and absolute. We are so sure that the world is the way that we see it; that we are who we say we are, people are the identities we prescribe to them, memories are exactly the way we recall, and circumstances will play out the same way they always have. In our desire to feel control over the life we have lived and the chaos of existence, we shroud ourselves in perfect illusions. The most deceiving of them all is the illusion of reality.
​
What does it mean to be "real"? We say something is real when it is either "authentic" or repeatedly "proven" to be true. It can then be said that "reality" implies two things: (1) truth; something fundamental, a core and (2) a pattern; something reoccurring that can reasonably predict a future. Reality is a pattern of truth.
​
(1) truth: something fundamental, a core
Truth is not something as simple as looking for what is. There may be an intuitive approach to dig for something immutable or absolute in this pursuit, but this would result in endless searching. If you keep digging and asking "why", if you look for something unshakable at a center, you will lose yourself in an infinite loop. Always finding several more questions for each answer. Truth is not something to be uncovered, but created. We reach a place where there is enough information to build a foundation, even if a shaky one, and live our lives as if it were essential, constant, unchanging. Truth is simply belief.
​​
(2) a pattern: something reoccurring that can reasonably predict a future
Patterns are perhaps more insidious than the illusion of truth. They imply verification, the idea that if there is a past that alludes to a present and future, then it is something that can be solidified in time. The danger of this is that a pattern is a tool of essentialization. It strips context away, all inconsistencies and nuance, in order to substitute complexity with ease. Patterns flatten narratives into easy to swallow truths. In order to predict a future or make sense of a past, we choose to omit information that muddies the stories we want to tell, and expand upon, sometimes even amplify or fabricate, information that affirms our desired truth. We make choices of what information is kept and tossed. In this way, we create patterns. A pattern is a story.
​
When we look at its component parts, it becomes clear that reality is only a story we choose to believe in. When we look at the whole picture, things are seldom as neat and clean as we would like them be. Everything is constantly changing and the things we hold to be so fundamental about existence are far more salient than most people are comfortable with. So instead, we choose to create illusions. Construct the most ornate lies to comfortably live our lives and flatten our narratives into the perfect images we long to lose ourselves in. What a waste it is to reduce a life so sophisticated, beautiful, complex for something as mundane as comfort. If you ask me, it is far better to accept a little messiness in your narratives. To acknowledge that everything is a little unreal. Only then can you experience it all.
​
Dreams and (Un)Reality
We are a limitless dream and only a dream.
​​​
A moment of suspension; seconds after you have woken up from an incredible dream or a terrible nightmare. A space opens before you ground yourself fully in your body. A span of time as brief as breath, you are neither in your dream or in reality. It is only after your mind has begun to settle, after it calms from the whiplash of moving between states of being, that you remember what you just experienced was just a dream. It wasn't real.
​​
Dreams are truthful in this way. They do not disguise themselves as anything more than illusions. Even if you believed it was real when you were asleep, when you awake, you see it for what it was: a trick, an image, an unreality. Dreams are also liars in this way. They are so light, so haphazard and unpredictable, there is no logic, order, reason, to the realm of dreams. And so, we diminish a dream to something that is invalid in our perception of what is real.
Truthfully, dreams have nothing to do with reality. Reality also has nothing to do with reality. What is real to us is what we grant validity to; it is the stories we choose to believe. If you choose to believe dreams are real, then they are. If you choose to believe they are unreal, then they are. There is no real or unreal. There is only perception and belief. ​​
​
What, then, distinguishes dreams from our waking experiences? Clearly, there is a difference in the images we see when we close our eyes to sleep at night and the images that fill our vision when we exist in the light of day. The difference lies in repetition and limitation. Dreams are the realm of the infinite, the limitless, and the impossible while Reality is the realm of the repeatable, the limited, and the possible.
We cannot fully exist in dreams; it is by nature an impossibility. In order to have any sort of existence at all, we must exist in limits and repetition. We must have a reality to ground ourselves in, but to live in a reality where dreams have no validity is to live in an endless loop of predictable outcomes. That is a prison.​
​
The function of dreams is not to create a space of impossibility to exist in, but rather to give us a means to create an opening that leads us outside of the repeated cycles of our lives. They allow for us to welcome seemingly impossible outcomes into our waking experiences and take us to places we have never been before. A dream is only unreal when we do not choose it. It becomes real when we believe it and repeat it; over and over and over again. Reality is repetition and belief; there is no distinction between possible and impossible, finite and infinite. There is only perception.
