The Relaxation of Time

Humans, like all organisms of the Universe, have natural rhythm. Rhythm of blood flow, heart rate, blink blink, death and birth, day and night. This much is obvious. So why is it then, that we enslave ourselves to the precision of the mechanical clock? Forcibly imposing rigid structures where they have no place. Allowing these rigid forms to run us, around and down.

This is a great theme of the modern Mind traced back as far as you would like to go, Egypt, Greece, Europe, Caucasians, to impose the Minds Will upon the Natural Order. Herein lies a great disharmony. There can be no peace, no ease, no harmony until this conflict is rectified.

This is not to say that clocks serve no purpose, they can, they do, but as with the Mind itself, only when used flexibly. The individual then, must yet again shed a dangerous assumption, that the clock is Real. Time itself, defining Life itself, but this is not so, much of, and certainly the most crucial aspects of life, occur within the framework and regularities of Natural Time. The Body knows.

The point is always this, when you get down to it, nothing is fixed, everything comes and goes, there is no time. There is this shifting form, this one form contains it all. A clock is not time any more than the word water is drinkable. These symbols, words and clocks, mechanical and beautiful, are useful and proper, but not It. The time is now, to reclaim your nature, to reclaim the nature of all of it.

Of course, one cannot banish the clock from ones life, we must still work and live in this structured reality. The point is not to move to the mountain top, the rivers edge, the cabin in the woods, no, the point is to draw awareness closer. Draw closer ones breath, ones hearing, ones sensitivity. Push back the Tyranny of the Clock, accept its use, and know its limitations. The Middle Way it says here.

The Art of Art

This video has further deepened my desire to create a series of art pieces based around the destruction of property.



What if this video is a fake? An elaborate design in deception and pure joy of destruction? Or perhaps it is a real artifact of surveillance and the accidental. Either way, I envision similarly short, silent videos of slow motion explosions of NAMELESS CORPORATION (trademark, copyright, owned and static) in the middle of the night. One grenade, two, dynamite, land mines, they could all be used.

Imagine a low fi surveillance style video with grainy resolution and low aperture. Placed twenty feet high, off center from the frame, but well lit. A patient moment or two transpire, until from the silence a violent explosion of window panes, corporate logos and cheap building materials rise up and out into a fiery ball of shrapnel and patterned chaos. The video hue and saturation purposely drenched and filtered, creating distorted images, heavily layered images.

Also, imagine extremely high def, well lit and crisp images of the same scenes, highly detailed images and vivid attention to detail. These images can exist, and should, for any and all formats of video reproduction.

Basically, our very suburban ambiance and surveillance subject to destruction and violent impermanence. What titillating images these would make. Semis driving into structural foundations of banks at night. CAT's digging wildly at the artifice of TRADEMARK. Heavenly destruction of unholy designs. Ah, the redemption.

Or maybe these aren't art pieces at all. Maybe they have a resonance and a political point or not. Maybe they feel religious in nature, or revolutionary. To me, they represent the latent reaction of the people, who have for so long been the subject of overwhelming dominance. Now they fight back. Call it art, call it life. Even the writing of it, makes certain truths heard. Silent no longer. Consider it real. It happened in this blog, in your imagination.

Sprawl

"...the single track of conscious attention is wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world." ~Watts~

One aspect of modern-suburban-Michigan life that has always interested me was that of Sprawl. In particular, where I grew up, Lake Orion, Oxford, Auburn Hills on down to Detroit was a sea of faux front buildings, corporate pharmacies, fast food repeats, and "stately" homes. Come to realize, no matter the direction you travel out from Detroit, it all looks the same, especially the further away from Detroit one gets. Come to find out, the whole country reeks of the same look, that same vibe.

Detroit and Ypsilanti, on the other hand, have a shockingly diverse, local, organic look and style. Everywhere you go there are hand painted signs for local businesses and twisty streets hiding decay and growth around every bend and right angle. There can be no doubt that Detroit is a beautiful city, in beautiful decay. We should clearly and deftly rebuild, reseed, replant, and repeople the jewel of modern cities that was/is Detroit.

My point is not this. My point is one of aesthetics. Like much of the rest of this American life we live, there exists a startling lack of beauty. The palate itself so cheaply conceived and so forcefully applied. Drab color schemes boring, unimaginative, impractical designs, complete disregard the natural world, as roads blaze straight-lined forever with convenient desires, drawn on with the most simple of geometries.

It is in this form that we live. Forced and dominating. We could, for instance, build towns around the preexisting forms of rivers, trees, and topography. We could create pocketed villages/communities scattered, nestled peaceably throughout the wooded lands that breathe our air and create our space. Each village/township utilizing their own farmers, their own architects, their own artists, their own educators, elderly and husky. Was there never a time when the look was considered? The design? The function?

This "look" is rather indicative of the mindset we have inherited and perpetuate, this grey march out and out. It is also rather indicative of our internal feelings, our internal imagination, that we accept this drab, we accept this lack of forethought, this lack of wisdom and lack of usefulness. What can one do? Like all matters, it requires a change of perception, a questing of perception that frees one from the mono-chromatic jail, the death march. One must engage with different perceptions, with themselves, other people, and nature to transcend the dis-eased mind. Only then can any social change occur, and really, social change is irrelevant until the individual is able to unshackle the mind of strict understandings and fixed concepts.

I prescribe two sensible modes of action and inquiry. Meditate. Permaculture.

"...the single track of conscious attention is wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world."