Sometimes, I wonder, what any of us believes in anymore. Something I learned during my brief time working at a music booking agency managing artists, was that it takes a lot of faith. When you sign someone on, you're committed to their potential and saying, I believe in you. But it goes both ways. As the artist, you have to have a lot of faith in the other person, too—that they’re guiding you with your best interests in mind. Marcus Aurelius stressed that the key to life is collaboration, and anything otherwise is unnatural. The whole world works in this way where we're equally responsible for each other. My office was in the Financial District then. The cleaner came in around 4 p.m. every day and always had a nice smile. After a while, I noticed she stopped coming in. It didn’t occur to ask myself until that moment—did I make her job harder or easier? Was the exchange just null? There must have been twenty of us in the office, and no one ever cleaned up after themselves. You leave the mess for someone else because it’s their job. Why do we look up to leaders, expecting "the government" to fix things? So we can keep littering the streets with all our shit while we assume someone will eventually take care of it? I think of America’s big “immigration sweep” in 2017. I think of the janitors, the families in the deli, the cleaner, and my neighbors at the laundromat. I think of the immense trash left over from the Women’s March at the National Mall in D.C. Signs dumped along the gutter, shrines of cardboard against traffic poles. The government is just this—trails of documents and emails and crumpled paper, a mess made for someone else.
Sometimes, my body chooses to power down from the daily horrors of the present. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism. I stay in the present and start to feel better. I finally feel good until I start to feel guilty, then I break down, like a delicate piece of china. Or a container, constantly dumping out and filling myself back up, consuming other people’s problems, holding onto recycled stories and lost conversations. Although we know what’s better for ourselves, we follow the worst. Hopes and fears. A free person is someone who bears the gifts and losses of fortune while deciding to do only the most important things in life. Free people are tolerant of other opinions and errors. These were the beliefs of Spinoza. Reality is often obscured by ideology, isn’t it? Are we held captive living with our multiple flat screens, reflective skyscrapers, the hall of mirrors, the simulacrum, heightened intensity, and loss of depth? Reflecting on late capitalism I ask, where are we now?
I opened an email my father wrote to me once, the subject line read When I was little. In the body, he wrote:
I had many questions you may have now. I used to think about what fun I’d have tomorrow. When I thought about death, I felt sad thinking about losing all the people I love. I said to myself, I will become a doctor who can invent a medicine that gives everlasting life to everyone. Many times, I fell asleep and questioned: Can I? When I became a teenager, eventually I became a nihilist. I thought every value and truth was temporary, relative, ultimately meaningless, and vain. Life for human beings relies on exchanges of electric signals happening in each brain. It’s like how electricity runs through our computers. When there is power, the computer shows wonderful colors, movies, and games… Once the power is off, there is nothing. In essence, there is no difference between a $500 laptop and me. Mind, Value, Truth, Love, and all the things human beings can learn, feel, admire, and cherish, happen through the human brain. And it is nothing but some fiber, fluid, and electric signals…
We’re nothing but patterns trying to maintain ourselves through homeostasis. The physical world has a tendency toward disorder, naturally becoming less organized with the passage of time. Nature, however, governs through the language of chance. Nature passively offers resistance to our attempts at decoding it. Us humans, we’re obsessed with control. Our silly rules. Laws. Maps.
Three years ago I started praying to god again. The Kabbalah says the first human, Adam, was not a male but both a male and female who was vertically divided, implying Eve was not made from a rib but their side. A friend once entertained the same theory that alt-right radio host Alex Jones proposed, something about water turning more people gay with there being so many chemicals in the sea. I think of water being queer as poetry. These days, I like to spend my time by large bodies of water. Like the way, how, from window to screen to nature to my hand, I’ve learned why art exists to me. Though, there we also exercise our dominance. But the ocean...the ocean is easy. The ocean seals wounds with salt. That is art. It is one thing to believe and have faith in maybe, that living in no fixed way is the most natural of states. We are always free to leave it all behind. Our labels, our identities, our worldmaking oppressions. It brings me back to that infamous quote by Bruce Lee—be like water.
This text originally appeared in my photo diary for The Art Paper’s Issue 04, which you can purchase to read the full story. <3
