La Deriva

This is an annotated transcript of the notes I jotted in my moleskin notebook over the course of the last three years. New paragraphs indicate different times throughout the day I was inspired to write my inner monologue. I’ve added nothing to the original text; what you are about to read is what you would’ve encountered had the book slipped out of my pocket on the bus and you decided to amuse yourself with the abstract reality of a stranger.

2019

All of us concerned about what concerns us.

Pantsuits are impossibly depressing at 730am.

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, whatever you find must be its most pure form.

All that limits my thoughts are every term I do not understand and every term I do understand constitutes all I can conceive of. We are the culmination of our vocabularies: mental, physical, visual, audible, and linguistic.

Somatic. Strange periodic unfounded spurts of insanity, energy, kinetic anger, a short circuit... an evolution, a misdemeanor, a bite of meat taken too aggressively off a titanium fork.

Being in bleeding, a game of chess, my eyes constantly burn, I am a Venus of my own invention. The anthropological in art is a narcissistic desire to sway in the arms of one’s own understanding: all we are are perceptions, rational or irrational, word of mouth, tongue in cheek, bend forward, boast with peacock breasts, be romantic, virgin, chaste, abject...Holy grail of moths, give me poetry in my stillness.

Delirium, obsession, orthodoxy. Time isn’t chronological. Painting is endless. It is so, is it so? (Nicole Eisenman)

I am a baby decolonized from my parents’ minds. Kill your parents, born again, I am fresh meat having some existential crisis and for the first time I feel I have a choice, the freedom may very well be the meaning of life... Uninhibited, we are completely ourselves...

These shapes I form as I write: I can not only comprehend them, they are also the evidence of the electrical processes happening in my mind— or brain?— they are disparate things... are thoughts from our heart, soul, consciousness, mind? Are the emotional biases just simulations masking the thoughts? Is every thought I have given to me? Already programmed in from the things I have known? Can I know something from nothing? Ex nihil nil fit? Are there limits to the thoughts I can have? Can I feel something from nothing? Why must meaning derive from negation? To function in art one must master symbology, iconography. Are defining “opposites” compartmentalizing and limiting concepts? Everything answers itself and each other.

2020

I want to destroy everything I have been in favor of the drift. I want to be washed clean of my past self. I can’t let music dictate my emotions, mood, tonality. I am in devotion in front

of the canvas, building the crescendoing hum of an all-engulfing silence in my mind. I am nothing without memory or language, we are only the present. I must circumcise my excesses, my core has already melted. I am not who I was and can never be again. I am again a blank slate waiting to be corrupted. By what? Whom? Can I have a thought whose seed is not already within me? Will I watch the sphere turn or will I walk around the sphere? Complacency or agency in ones’ corruption... since I cannot make thoughts I don’t already have, I must let accidents and other forces make my work. I am simply the curator.

There’s only one age: either you’re alive or you’re not. Art is so much deeper than I ever understood, my understanding of the world was so superficial. My emotions were erratic, childish fits, blind, darkness. My “understanding” was an illusion, a construct set to induce docility. All my worries, fears, anxieties, sleeping and waking, sitting up straight in bed...I’ll slip away indeed... fade away... drift...

Even rocks under a microscope aren’t solids. Do I know the blues? A most disgusting song. I spoke of the past, of my parents’ beliefs that defined and labeled me... girl, daughter, big sister, my name, American, a strange collection of meaningless shades... can we ever understand? A “balanced” life? Exercise? Lots of sleep? Frequent meals? For what? I don’t even care, over time, collectiveness, why do we buy into it? If I exercise every day, I’ll be happy. Happy? Or deluded? (Kierkegaard, dizziness of freedom) Happy on a level deeper than the hazy blockage culture and peer pressure has put on you? The only things that are real are sex and.... Just sex I guess. Even death, a condition which I believed united us all, is just the name of unknown.

2021

So many months have passed since I started this moleskin in November, sitting down to write at Zach’s kitchen table in the tenderloin. I was so careful about the words I put down with my thin-tipped mircon on those scrumptious blank pages, aesthetically elevating my internal monologue. The words felt more weighty, prescribed on these pages. They catechized my neurosis. Now I’m back in the bay and the beginning.

The aftermath of art school is dismal but coronavirus can really girdle the prospects of a twenty-something with horse power who just wants to runrunrun away from here. Back at square one I now need a job— I can only crash at Zach’s apartment until the end of this month. I need money. I was holding out for an art job but no galleries are hiring. Need to apply to Trader Joe’s this week. Getting a discount on groceries is good. Every time my phone buzzes with gmail, adrenaline pumps into my chest thinking it might be one of the kids’ art teacher jobs I applied to. Noted: walked past a free food fridge on MLK and Adeline in Oakland.

How can one be original in the humdrum of the homogenous narrative? Can the vague size of the term ‘pandemic’ be molded into nuance enough to have significance beyond the same tired repetition? I seem to gather lately that an integration of the meta narrative into the work is a way to make relevance in the piece itself outside of the self. It is the adrenaline of reading anothers’ diary: the words directly correlating to the story each choice and thought is sculpting. It is literally alive, active. Making art in a post-internet world necessitates the aggregation of kinetic change.

Clio came over yesterday, Mitch downloaded tinder again and they fought. We started to make plans for different online exhibitions to apply to. I’m so sick of the flat graphic of art online, the total loss of aura like Barthes talked about. But aura is no longer the impetus of society, and good art seems to be able to connect disparities and contradictions outside the boundaries of a single mode, such as language, leaving mysteries to be uncovered in the multiplicity while giving enough information to stimulate connections. Like the puzzle of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights that my mom would sometimes sit still over beneath a lamp at the linoleum kitchen table, a load of laundry purring in the background and all my siblings asleep. I never saw her so peaceful as those moments, rubbing one socked foot against her tired ankle.

I can’t wait to make the sculptures Clio and I planned out, focusing on the goop of our relationship, the shattered orb in the face of isolation-world. We are so romantic in our approach, and although one could argue that abstract cynicism is the sort of on-the-nose tone that everyone (consciously or unconsciously) is disseminating, I have the sort of pre-Internet dreamy romance that still believes in the possibility of a pageant girl world-peace outcome.

She sent me a post over instagram about this $20,000 prize for a short story about someone who mysteriously wins that amount of money, and must include at some point a ‘little black book’. I’m going to go for it. I’m submitting into the void when I need to be using that time to look for how I’m going to make money for food next week, but I feel a need to do it. I can’t give up before I start because I’m simply a drop in the ocean: isn’t that what this cosmopolitan world is? Especially now, in this new tribalism, one degree farther than the increasingly nuanced term for the brand and hair cut, is this ‘pod’ existence insulated by fear. This is the vein Clio and I are trying to penetrate with our sculptures.

How do I follow their rules enough to be considered while still avoiding the cliche? How do I write something that I can stand behind, when I have to write under guidelines that wouldn’t be the story I want to tell? How do I contend with the destruction incurred by the vying limelight in the distracted ego of competition, motivated by the need for money?

Would it not be ego, still, to sit on a phantom high horse pretending that I am separate from the world around me? Omnipotent observer of the ones who win, telling myself I can’t sacrifice my ‘authenticity' like the competition requires, while I serve sticky cocktails at a bar in west Oakland to masked and distanced patrons, and shapes in Sans Serif form another name that wins $20,000 on a website whose guidelines I once seriously browsed? How long until the seriousness that accompanies belief in oneself stops echoing the ‘what if?’ in the back of my headache?

Today I thought about writing something sci-fi for the competition. I want to write a sci- fi book just to make the cover art, with those punny titles in blockbuster fonts and intricate oil scenes, damsels and animals.

I don’t know what to write.

Reality is more abstract than fiction. Write my reality?

I have come to understand things in terms of limitations.

I start work at Trader Joe’s on Monday. Everyone rotates but I’ll be shadowing this guy Joseph stocking the back room mostly. At least I’ll get some exercise in, more time to paint in the evenings when I get home.

Clio and Mitch broke up today. We cried on her bathroom floor together and finished his bottle of tequila. Next week is the deadline to submit our sculptures. I think I can do the rest of the heavy lifting, she needs to get through the work week until we can make it to the beach this weekend or something. Wanna make a drawing to give her.

Being an ‘adult’ is like completing an online form to register for food stamps that keeps on refreshing and deleting all the data. It is completing tasks that require the acquisition and organization of lots of different information only to be voided by an oncoming summit with a deadline just as urgent as the previous. No wonder people love treadmills. One can simulate their condition in a manageable, controlled environment, and regardless of whether they reach the end of the programmed workout, they still accomplished something. I need to start working out, all this money and housing stress is making me gain weight.

The contemporary age is a cockfight to death by cortosil, cancer, or coronavirus.

Today my phone buzzed and the little gmail app showed up. Since I got the Trader Joe’s job I’ve stopped checking so I didn’t open it until I got on the bus, where I’m sitting as I write this with the dramatic tears of my blurry reflection in the window across from me. I feel cheesy saying the thing, I’m about to call mom I just wanted to calm down the choke in my throat first. I got the money. I actually won somehow. I actually just won $20,000. Do you see that? Do you see the numbers on the page? 20000000000000? I’m calling mom.