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So I was going to expel something trance-like, lyrical almost, about the nature of suffering and somewhere between getting my laptop out and sitting down to dazzle the keyboard, I must have remembered why I never write about suffering anymore - not post 21 anyway. I'm over the physical labor of cursive. I spent the ages of 15 to 21 writing heavily in journals made of paper and fine leather bound covers, making friends with writer's cramp and the bump on my middle finger, and making every word count, every sentence as poetic and packed with meaning as possible. So instead, I'm rambling, like a proper 21st century blogger.
My first 6 years of the 2000's was spent stiffly practicing Vipassana while helping people die in their homes (hospice work) and taking care of those whom had begun losing their minds and bodily functions. Suffering was my psychology. Theory and practice were completely indistinct. Vipassana gave me great insight and almost an indifference towards pain and pleasure. Thank you, Satipatthana Sutta. It was a serene six years with you.
My perfect lover was a text, universes long, on the condition of suffering. It was imperative for me to gain experiential knowledge in metaphysics, and it manifested through my meditation practice. My primary relationship was between myself and what was called 'dhamma'. (Woe to any lover that tried to change that.) It was a sort of Theravadic romance that left me with one very tough lesson about the way in which my psyche works, which was that my existence has always been a constant appraisal: an appraisal of the self.
In this moment... Am I seeking suffering? Am I relieved of suffering? Am I currently suffering? Am I anticipating suffering? Am I evading suffering? Am I postponing suffering? Am I running from pain or running towards pleasure? (The teaching, and my experience, begs me to be neither.)
I have just put myself and my artistic insight, talent and specialty all up for grabs while undergoing the trials of art school. Mostly I have been rewarded for my efforts. I did what they said. I wrote papers and read texts and learned what was proper to learn. I consumed, digested, and excreted knowledge for the sake of fitting in and earning my fair place in the world via a degree in higher education. I prepared for the future (or so I thought). I looked back at my past and evaluated it, to help myself accomplish many academic projects (drawing from experience, like my meditation teachers insisted). But never did I let myself live in the moment... for if I had, I would have never gotten through my degree. My thoughts about the institutionalization of art would have sent me running. So I kept them drowned out, and I did not live in the moment. I did not meditate, and clam myself daily in silence like I had so cleverly done before. In silence, one can hear their own voice. In a crowd (the institution), one only hears the loudest voice. Now here I am, after several changes in my major of study, a semester away from graduating.
In this moment, I am evading suffering. I am forsaking all committed love and romance, for my big love. What's my big love, I ask myself? In this moment, it is the idea of delving into two years of advanced study in the very things that move me... and in the form of visual art and narration. I'd like to focus on this thing of suffering. I'd like to tackle it. It's been my specialty all my life.
I can not escape it and I have many stories to tell of it. And so, thinking about a master's program that is right for me and what I have to offer, I have had a couple of eurekas...
First, that I must honor my struggles by acknowledging their influence. Minorities and others less fortunate, that show promise for community, would be wise to approach endowment and grant proposals with an honest history of the self and it's advances in the world, physically, intellectually, socially, spiritually, professionally. My approach to essay writing has always been influenced by my trials of pain and my trials of pleasure... my sufferings, and my passions. It seems that everything in this academic "system" demands of us the detailed proof of our worthy existence, in exchange for the promise of privilege and security. Are you 'good' or are you 'bad'? Well, why not ask us, are you 'real'? Everyone is both good and bad. Period. Not everyone is real. Some people are simply stand-ins for what the media wishes us to be; they are actors and actresses standing in as 'real' people, but what is real about hiding your past and your flaws (which, in my humble opinion, is the source of beauty and truth)? What is 'real' about trying to be the perfect model of 'good'? Absolutely nothing. There is no character so great that hasn't endured an even greater amount of adversity.
It's funny how my own suffering, which led me to help myself with Vipassana meditation, was the reason that I got "lucky" with a full tuition scholarship for my undergrad. It's almost disturbing that my pain led me right into a situation where I was offered, without asking, a full ride. (That's a story for another day.) As I sit here sifting through bits of scrap paper, emails, links, brochures, conference materials, napkins, notebooks and websites - looking to narrow down the list of desired grad programs - it hits me. I thrive in strife. I succeed because I suffer. In 2005 I was majoring in psychology with a minor in creative writing. I was prepping myself to professionalize in a realm where an existential human concern (the nature of suffering itself) was the absolute zenith of my proposed future work. As a visual artist, does my proposed future work look that much different than a psychologist's work?
I never created art other than for myself. My dire need for the expression of an overly active imagination was the most important part of what I called my 'art'. The process was really all I cared for, and is the reason that I refused to enroll in SAIC straight out of high school (the proposed route as per my father). That cathartic chunk of time that I'd spend on the floor (or in a tent, wherever), always on my knees as if in holy reverence to the internal temple of life, was a medicine with no substitute. The end result was only an index, a reference to those moments that culminated in a 'final' piece of art. I never had commerce in mind, and certainly not collectibility. I had my own needs in mind. My need to create. It was and is selfish. And it will never change. If I keep creating, I keep existing.
"I create, therefore I exist."
And having always been a creature of both strife and passion, what I have created has mostly been about human psychology. We are hard-wired to perceive pain and pleasure and move around in the world based off of those basic functions. I am now discovering better ways to bring light into heavy subjects, to bring love into stories of strife. In my selfishness as an artist I must know that someone, anyone, will get it.
In this moment, I am diminishing my own suffering. Surely, there is a road for me that isn't wrought with ego-mania and that actually nourishes my heart, rather than my head. Is that an oxymoron for a hopeful grad student? The questions we must ask ourselves!
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| (In 1996 I tried painting for the first time. I was 16, trying to convey my strange sense of isolation in an ironically large family. It was a rainbow arch connecting two floating land masses in space, where I painted a house for me to live in, keeping most of the details of the other land mass a mystery. I called it, "It's Alright". This is a far cry from what I have been doing with my art education in the last few years, with the pressures of doing something 'new'. What has the academic art world to offer me, if not solace and redemption?) |
