From the Vault, Part II

Was looking through what I thought was a pile of blank journals I have (there are quite a few, it's a bit of a thing with me), trying to find one suited to pasting some images of my dissolvable garment in it. Turns out quite a few of them have stuff written in it, stuff I've forgotten about. A lot of it, like the word document I blogged about a few weeks ago, is about death and consciousness. I find it interesting that:

a) these issues have been occupying my mind for such a long time...
b) that I'd forgotten about these things that I'd written.

It reminds me of the fact that one day, someone will be going through my things when I die, wondering what to do with them, why certain things were kept and held on to and treasured, getting what they might consider insights to someone they thought they knew as they sort though an assemblage of objects that made up my life and as they read these strange thoughts I have tried to marshal on paper.

I know that it is ME that has written these things... but not quite me, somehow, as I have forgotten about them. I am revisiting myself - with who I was at a certain moment in time. Parts of me are coming alive again. I'd like to think that this is what happens when someone looks at my things when I am gone.

Well...

... that was interesting. Had a look at my old journals, and apart from it being a really weird experience, reading over all of my entries, I didn't really come across anything I'd want to include in a time capsule. I think the reason is that they are old entries... and I no longer identify with the things I wrote back then. They're not me.

So I'll just have to write something new.

Inspiration...

Was feeling a bit stressed this morning about workload, etc, wondering how/when everything that I want to do will get done, and also wondering just why I was doing it as well. Have been so caught up in the making of things and worrying about pendants being cast in time, and the resin having enough time to cure that I'd lost sight of the meaning behind my work...

But this reminded me...a look at how death is dealt with in science fiction/fantasy stories, with some fantastic quotes to go with it.
Here is the link, if anyone reading this is interested:

http://io9.com/5671818/10-great-science-fiction-and-fantasy-stories-that-deal-with-death

Here are the quotes that really resonated with me:

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

I love this quote for the simple reason that it is a beautiful meditation on what we leave behind, all the little touches and traces that we leave on the world even after we are no longer in it.

This is very much a part of my work... creating little mementos that are essentially monuments to people we love, that encapsulate aspects of them, whether this is literal (the use of hair or other 'DNA things'), or more abstract, such as photographs. Not only do the pieces show the connection between people (given that the pendants can be split into separate components), but they contain some physical aspect that is immortalised. Ah, now that's the word. Immortal. By existing in this world, (as long as we are remembered, or the work that we leave behind reminds the living of the fact that we once were here) we create our own version of immortality.

I feel that this is the crux of this quote... the idea that something of us will always be left behind.
Below is the other quote that I couldn't resist posting:

***

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.

- Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Having recently completed reading Slaughterhouse Five, there are actually a whole pile of quotes that I've been meaning to blog about for ages.

This quote is one of the main ones that really got me thinking. It is a musing by the protagonist about a race of aliens, who see the universe in four dimensions - they can see the past and the future. It is an interesting thought - that although someone may be dead, they are very much alive in the past. A strange comfort, perhaps, but I suppose to us mere humans (who can only sense three dimensions!), it is a reminder to not just mourn the dead, but to celebrate the lives they lived as well.

While I have still yet to come to grips with the idea of immortality through time travel (it does hurt my head a bit), it does make sense. In fact, it is just an extension of the idea that we leave traces of ourselves behind as we live... as we move through time in a linear fashion. However, if we were able to go back in time, live our lives in the 'wrong' order, then the paradoxes created would mean we always existed in certain moments... we'd be immortal for as long as the universe existed!

But I'm going to stop writing about this now, my brain is having a bit of a hernia. The only thing that remains for me to do is to consider how such thoughts might be worked into a pendant... maybe Mobius strips? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip) Or patterns containing interconnecting circles (which represent eternity)?... Hmmm...

***

purge (and black holes in b flat)

So... The thing on my mind the most at the moment is my final collection. Have been doing a lot of stuff with materials exploration, and getting some really good results. Will post images soon.
But at the same time I get so distracted by thinking about the creative process, or more specifically, wondering just what it is to be creative. Why do humans want to make or write or draw? What is it that lends to us this urge... sometimes so overwhelming and powerful that even if you were able to etch something of yourself into the very sky it would never be enough?

If life is just 'a quirk of matter', or an accident of chemicals and evolution, then why do we need to create as well? Maybe deep down (and this is me being a little cynical here), we know that there is no meaning to life, and we attempt to fill our lives with stuff to distract us from this otherwise horrifying fact. Perhaps all of our actions are dictated by a deep seated knowledge of our own mortality, and the desire to create is our way of saying I was here, I saw this, I experienced it... I won't be here forever, but maybe my impression of this world will be.
Or perhaps we are just echoing the natural state of things - the universe creates (and destroys) in never ending cycles. Humans can be pretty horribly destructive, too.

There was a great documentary on a few weeks ago about humans and music, and the incredibly important role it plays in our lives. Throughout most of it, I was asking myself why music has this pull on us, and why wasn't the documentary addressing this same 'why'?

Coincidentally, I'd been thinking about this very thing a few days before. I'd been reading about mathematical equations describing decay (as you do) and the natural number e, which is associated with decay as well. As I'm sure you all know, the internet is a weird and wonderful place, and I stumbled across an article about how e was associated with the guitar playing in U2 songs. It was then that the idea that everything might be connected at some level began to take seed - music to maths to wavelengths and echoes possibly going back to be beginning of the universe.

But I digress. So, there I was, getting fed up at the fact that this fundamental question was ignored, when the documentary veered into the territory of physics. Suddenly, there was Brian Greene (a proponent of string theory), explaining that the universe sings too. Suddenly, that little seed of an idea started blooming in my mind. How amazing - there are black holes that emit the precise pitch of B flat. If string theory is true - if the most fundamental components of the universe are tiny strings, each resonating at a different wavelength or pitch, then that makes us part of a giant symphony. Sometimes harmonic, perhaps discordant at times, but we'd always be tuned into something wonderfully bigger than we are.

Um. So, yeah. It is these kind of thoughts that can distract me from doing stuff sometimes. I get too caught up in the why of it all. But I shall persevere.

Why do I have to put a title for each post?

So, for the past couple of weeks I've been really thinking about the remainders that a decomposing garment would leave when buried. This is something that has been the focus or aim of my burial experiment - to leave the 'wreath' that is worked into the hood of my garment as something that is left behind after the rest of the cloth breaks down.

But what about inverting the idea? Instead of focussing on the disintegration, what about looking at ways that the buried garment could create something new? Perhaps there are ways of treating the garment so that it beautifies or changes over time? Or maybe seeds could be part of the garment, helping to make new life from old?

Some things to consider, anyway...

Who (or what) are we, anyway?

Is our body really 'ours' in the way we think it is?
Every year, 98% of the atoms in our body are replaced. I am not the same 'me' than I was at the age of five, or at the time I was born.
Our bodies are ever changing vessels for our souls or consciousness - an ever changing array of atoms held together by a series of physical forces, containing whatever it is that makes us 'us' upon this earth for as long as it can endure.