i met a Mathematician in the gardens

he was strolling down the steps of life and death
you are not supposed to go so backwards sir
from death to life
he does not beleive in the soul (he has a PhD in logic) and
he does not beleive that i could either

i am Neuroscience
let us take over the world
what is free will made of
let us look for quantum uncertainties in water

if you do not hear from me, i
have been swallowed by the system or
am dead

I wish I had not lost his email.

all i have in my head are these grey boxes, they wont go away till i put them on the internet

you gnow what stuns me everytime

is the effect that psychology has on the image we see

not (just) in that we see what we want to

or that it makes slopes seems steeper than they are

but there is an even-more-pure skewing

i noticed it first when i painted the dunedin harbour and hills

its never till you are viewing the finished painting online

that you see how you have ackzaggerated whatever you consider to be the focus of the view

because of the fovea; because in the centre of your retina is a spot that is crammed with photoreceptors

and whatever you are looking straight at gets horrendously overprocessed

and because your brain says 'better = bigger' (stupid brain,) i painted the notable mountains much higher than they actually were

and comparing the photograph to it,

each peak seems unbelievably inconsequetial.

and then there are portraits where the strange nose gets somehow bigger...

you gnow what tort me kuller like nothing else? trying to deceptively edit photoes in microsoft paint. you think something is one colour and you pick the same one from the palette box but then you get it onto the actual photo and it is nothing like what you thort. and you think an area is one colour but eventually you are forced to beleive that there is a tonal variation there that your brain was adamantly denying....

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BELEIVE WHAT YOU SEE

belief is for the weak, and you must build a life without it before you can be truly happy

-buddha (me)

a house made of nostalgia

i fall in love with a song

i play it endlessly for days

because through it i go somewhere else

somewhere beautiful

where there is grace

and i wiki its origins, its background, i pore over the comments on the youtube clips of it, i pore over the ideas that listeners have of it's meaning, i look for photos of the musicians, i seek to feel like part of the community of listeners.

and all because i have lost parts of my soul

after the great disintegration

sometimes i find pieces of it locked inside songs

and can only go view it through a glass darkly

by listening

i usually find in my researching that a musician has a strong past experience or childhood in common with me.

it explained why my brothers, stepbrother, and i listen to Skillet music, frontman John Cooper had the same kind of loss and family stuff in his adolescence that we had in ours. when i read that i had already been experiencing for years that his music assaults my soul and intensely loves me - it is daunting.

in the case of my most recent crush, i found that though the entire album was instrumental, it had been created about the ghosts that we create out of lost people and eras.

"The album title has to do with chasing after symbolic shadows, as in reflections of things and not the reality. They might be reflections of the past or losses that linger in our lives but are no longer real. We don't beleive in ghosts--living with a ghost to us just represents living with the memories of events or people who have died in your own life. The album takes up the theme of impermanence, and I think that the sooner we embrace our own impermanence, the more meaningful our lives become."

i know my entire creativity is attempting to record the ghosts. i chase after reflections, writing poetry about shadows, creating online photo albums and blogging, all about shadows, about that which is only a suggestion of something real, as a shadow describes an object but does not exist.

“I'm fascinated with structures that are being reclaimed by nature – by weeds, vines, some force of nature pulling down a manmade object...I see beauty in it. Hammock's music is like that.”

seriously! It's just music. How did my soul know that the artist was thinking that when they made it? My entire art is all about showing beauty that was previously obscure and undiscovered. My grandmother's art too; my mother reckons she must have painted every rusty shed in all of Otago....and the aforementioned musicmen talk about zen and francis bacon and that beauty which you only find in pain and sorrow in the making of the album, all things which i am passionate about but usually fail in trying to communicate or bond with people over.

my house of nostalgia is bleeding on me, but i dont mind.

~poetry that wasn't quite so brilliant in the mawning~

the harbour is littered with sailboats today, jets hanging above. i walk along the waterfront to church.

in the choir, i get hypoxically high; the medieval robes are deliciously swishing and occlusive. to partake in chants that monks have sung for centuries; to be a mere part of history, this pleases my socialist nature.

the artists are the prophets

* 0 * *

after four months, i finally have an actual bed, i have hung my photography, my grandmother and aunt's paintings are on the wall, my other aunt's quilt on my bed.

electric blanket!!!

i am going volcano climbing!!

i am going home for my birthday!!!

today i bought lamb and bok choy from the markets, and tried some chestnuts from the man who had sold some to stephen fry the fortnight before. the harbour is yet enchanted on the way home, all flat water and snowy backdrop, there is a ferry in the background and a sailboarder in this foreground:

six hours later, i get back from latin chants and candles and dread silences in a dark church, with an organist who takes herself very seriously, and down syndrome children who broke the reverence with the occaisional inhuman howl.

it was fantastic.

winter is over and mating season is upon us.