I've always felt a bit off about receiving any form of sincere commendation with regards to my writing. I mean okay, I know I have a fairly adequate command of the English language but writing, regardless if it's for journal entries like this, disjointed "poetry" or the occasional bag of lyrics, was never something I wanted to do; much less something I'd be good at. Rather, I always saw writing as a sublimation of my frustration towards my lack of talent in the visual arts, mediated by the added frustration of my numerous (albeit lackluster) attempts to compensate by means of musical expression. Looking back, since I believed myself to be less of a literary failure than I am in those two other fields, writing was the only recourse I had. At the very least, I should be able to articulate certain aspects of the images I see in my own head.
I don't know if this makes sense but words don't really speak to me. Not nearly as much as actually being there to experience the vividness of the northern lights or the reassuring warmth of a lover's touch in even the coldest of nights. These are things that go beyond my capacity to articulate. These are moments that exist beyond the realm of words. At least it's that way for me. Not that I'm ragging on literature, though. I've always had an intense admiration for those who could weave intricate webs of meaning with the words they piece together. All I mean to say is that my receptivity towards the language of experience, inter-subjectivity and inherent meaning leans toward symbolic interpretations of beingness, stripped of the limits of a social context.
Long story short, my mind caters to the whole spectrum of one's individual perception of the world and its phenomena, broken down into binaries that spell out narratives by means of the presence/absence dichotomy they create. Single images that create entire life stories, the stories of places, of incidental people and of the objects they interact with and/or create for themselves. All without a single word spoken. I look to presence and absence as crucial forces in the formation of meaning.
All of this happens on an individual level and when I'm pulled back into the wax and wane of my own social context, I walk away with a little piece of everyone else's quiet narratives. That said, a number of select individuals have contributed immensely to the development of my perspective on life.
An adequate summary of this phenomenon is seen in the formation of what I refer to in my own taxonomy as Tristecism. The basic premise underlying the Tristecist perception of life and living is that all humans are situated in that same presence-absence dichotomy. All meaning is fundamentally derived from the absence and more so, the loss of certain values. The subsequent compounding of values and/or the lack thereof forms a series of experiential binaries. Each in itself, constituting part of a narrative structure which leaves itself open to reinterpretation and generative projection. The issue of substance has always been subject to the valuation of objects, at least as far as I know. I could be wrong. This perspective however posits that meaning is not to be derived from what an object is or appears to be but rather from the spaces and gaps that allow the object to be defined in reference to a greater context, much in the manner of a sculptor chipping away at a slab of rock to produce identifiable shapes and forms. Consequently, as objects or phenomena are liable to change, the loss of certain attributes would denote a transition in the composition of these experiential binary strings from one configuration to another, thus laying down the groundwork for another set of narratives to be drawn from and drawn into.
Always moving and ever dynamic, the perspective more than matches the valleys and peaks of shared human experience. With the above stated, let's go into how specific examples of the continuum of shared human experience persists to shape my own personhood on both an epistemological and aesthetic level. More on this in a subsequent entry.
