moderation

well i suppose it had to happen. even tho i've set up word verification, i received a spamming "inappropriate" comment to an old post.

i could not figure any way of deleting it without increasing the moderated status.
so now comments don't show.

bummer.

not that i get many comments anyway!

i've been thinking about the darkside of my art. some say that the purpose of art is to increase joy peace and happiness of others. sounds great. i increase my own joy through the processes of my art, increasing the joy peace and happiness of others seems like a good goal in general. but...

See there's this thing that more than communicating the beauty i see, more than communicating the eternal and infinite behind our material world. It's this need i have to bring forward the shadow and put it in view. i wouldn't say full view cuz i don't think my work has done that since hi sch.

it's more supple. anyway i thought for a while that it's wrong to have this urge to confront the audience. it's wrong to spread bad, dark interpretations of our world. but then i thought about a zen concept that goes something like this: each of us, while part of this material world, quite naturally has flaws, does wrong, suffers and creates suffering. we create more pain for ourselves and others by denying the flawed state, by separating it out, splitting it from ourselves and demonizing it.

Instead it we do not back away from the things that make us uncomfortable, embrace the shadow within, then we will be fully integrated people. When something or someone makes us uncomfortable, we should examine it more to see the connection to our full selves.

Of course there's this huge contradiction that i have not yet learned to deal with is that we have so much darkness that it really must be on a leash. that we really feel better and function more completely when we move toward the more positive interpretation of each moment. It's a new challenge not a failure, that sort of thing. So i need to work this out in order to fell fully comfortable revealing the darkside in my work.

In hi school i had no reservation because i was angry and wanted to hurt others, especially those that i thought had not suffered. I did not care that acting out of anger multiplied the anger. and did not make it available for examination or assimilation into the complete self.

the link above is to a pod cast at radiantvista in which the discussion of journaling heads toward this spiritual issue. He discusses a book called The End of Suffering. just the name gets my head spinning. you know, there is no suffering in the spiritual dimension. i know, i've been there. it feels wonderful. but it lacks something that we have in the material world. the struggle is great! there is no struggle without suffering. It's the feeling of discontent that motivates us to move. at all. if everything is perfect we don't need to do anything. that total contentment creates a sense of timelessness and spacelessness in the spiritual world. very yummy indeed. but the material world requires breathing, therefore movement. respiration creates change, eating, digesting create change and the need to breath, the need to eat create neediness. so life involves movement, need, change. And we are really lucky to be a part of it.

The podcast discusses how we can add structure to our photography by creating a purpose statement. Which i agree with but he says that a purpose can be to bring peace joy and happiness ... this will bring us to work in the moment. There are so many things about that that i don't know where to begin. Yes it's good to focus on the good you can do as an artist. but i think it overcomplicates the moment of creating if we see the whole world as our audience. I think it's fine for reflection but at the moment of creating i like to focus on the now by focusing on my own experience and my sense of connection with it without going too far down the heuristic road of contemplating my impact on the infinite universe through the art that is attempting to capture it.

wow, think of the problem of the physicist who's very attempt to measure the movement of a particle changes it! SO of course at the moment f creation i'm changing it. but should this be on my mind? There are times when is see an imagined audience reacting to my work and it's really stifling - even when it's a positive reaction because i am immediately aware that that was not exactly what i meant to communicate and that all forms of communication are flawed, even art. So it takes away from the pure form of communication that i can have when shooting - between my spirit and the spirit of the thing before my camera and the spirit that is created with the new piece of art. like giving birth. if we thought of all the possible impacts our children might have before we birthed them - we might not do it. well i'm babbling again!
more coffee!