Less is Less

To Whom It May Concern

I had an idea:

That less is not more, it is less, more or less.

So I decided not to make something.

Oh well. It was only an idea.

Graffiti Theology

Would you like depth with that?
Would you like tea with that?
If you can imagine something
That exists
Somewhere in the universe
It will exist.
Old sins cast long shadows.
Those who know do not say
Those who say do not know
You are a longtime dead.
Change the things you can change
And don’t change the things you can’t.
If you give more than you get
You will be blessed.
Would you like depth with that?
Do what you say
Don’t say what you do.
Less is more
More or less
Never grow a wishbone
Where a backbone ought to be.
Actions speak louder than words.
So much to do
So little time.
There will still be money
When you are dead and gone.
Life is short
And death is long.
Would you like tea with that?
Would you like depth with that?

Would you like Depth with That?

I Had An Idea:

That I wanted to make a tea set to accompany my work titled:

“Would You Like Depth With That?”

The work is to be presented in the form of a bound book containing 31 drawings completed over a month and interspersed with pieces of writing.

For the exhibition of the book I envisage a room set with two comfortable high back library chairs upholstered and buttoned, in perhaps, a mustard-coloured floral linen.

They are positioned slightly away from the fireplace and have their backs to the windows.
 
The book is set down in front of the reader, on a small attractive polished wood table by the gallery assistant who would then enquire of the page-turner

“Would you like tea with that?”

The tea set I have made, in my mind’s eye, would arrive on a silver salver, and consist of a porcelain teapot with an ornate pouring spout, that bulges as it leaves the pot at the mid area, but tapers to a fine thin elegance as it reaches the end that dispenses the tea into the cup in a fine amber arc.

“If you can imagine something then somewhere in the universe it will exist.”

The pot itself would visibly be an upside down skull. The sunken eyes gently punched into depressions, by thumbs that have applied equal pressure to the clay.

The spout issuing forth from the triangular hole under the nasal bone and following the highest point, would arch elegantly away from the prominent jaw, turning upwards after curving out from the nose bone that juts from between the eyes.


“Old sins cast long shadows.”


At the base of the skull, behind the underside of the chin that now faces upwards, a 6 cm hole would have been neatly incised, in which to nestle the lid.
 
This is slightly wider than the 2.5 cm hole, which accommodates the spinal cord, but seems more generous for dropping in spoonfuls of tea.

The lid with its circular diameter, would peak in a gentle rise narrowing to a 2.5cm circular platform on top of which would perch a miniaturised vertebrae.
This would enable the lid to be lifted with ease and boiling water to be poured into the skull.


“Those who know do not say
Those who say do not know”


The handle which rises from the back of the skull should incorporate both a Victorian elegance in the finesse of its sweep, but a strength of purpose in the amount of fired clay grasped by the hand of the pourer.

Two cups would be enough to complete the set, again these would be upside down heads but now missing the lower jaw.

The cheekbones flaring out to the side should add a dainty elegance to the shape and would be the best point from which to sip.

The handle in that case would issue from the back of the skull and would start to unfurl from the small point at its base. The handle would then open into a high circle before sweeping down to a few mms from the cranium.  I envisage the cup will rest on the table without a saucer.


“You are a long time dead.”


A sugar bowl and milk jug would be nice.  
The sugar bowl would be a miniature of the teapot but without a spout and with two handles. These would be placed at the sides of the head in the position of the ears.

The cranium hole again serving as a focal point in which to incise the enlarged hole for the lid, which again would be 6 cm tapering to its miniature spinal knob.


“Change the things you can change and don’t change the things you can’t.”


The milk jug would be a thing of beauty, as the upside down skull with its prow-like jaw, needs minimal reshaping to make a perfect pouring spout.

With the teeth flattened to a plane that sits over the interior, and a gap left between the front teeth, the nasal bone with its sweet curve would pour milk very well.

As it would be a smaller vessel than the teapot, a handle would be superfluous.

Instead the hand can come around the outside of the cranium from the rear and rest under the flared cheekbones with the fingers finding extra grip where the bone continues down towards the rims of the eye sockets.


“If you give more than you get, you will be blessed”


As the tea set would be made of porcelain, it can be glazed in bright white and painted with fine cobalt blue decorations in the style of majolica.

The teapot’s dented eyes would be darkened to shadows while around them would be patterns of petals and dots.
Between the eyes and at the centre of the forehead would be a painted iris, un-lidded, round and blue.

Around this would be a ribbon line that starts at one side and loops at five points before trailing off, as though a never ending knot is now unraveled.


“Would You Like Depth With That?

Around the lip that will hold the lid, I envisage a simple blue line, repeated also down each side of the handle.

This line would also decorate the base of the lid, and encircle the base of the platform on which rests the shrunken spine.

At the top of the vertebrae a small round yet flattened dome would be gilded with dark shiny gold.

The same cobalt would delineate the prominent exposed grinning teeth of the rictus jaw, with small triangles linked side by side, encircling the gums like a necklace of pointed shark teeth.


 “Do what you say
Don’t say what you do.”


It is difficult to describe further painted decoration as from here it would be a matter of adding balance to the whole form, by adding extra patterning where needed.

A line defining the temple and following the undulations down to the position of the ear hole would be the starting point.

Perhaps a flower with a dark pollen centre


“Less is more”
“More or less”

 

The cups deserve a simpler scheme, with their depressed eyes merely outlined with cobalt and then an encircling outer line of petals with dots between.

Again the handles edges would have a simple fine line of blue. Perhaps the interior of the triangular nasal bone could be painted dark blue?

I would need to see it.

The sugar bowls patterning would match the teapot.

Around the milk jug, a fine line of blue would trace the shape at the rim, from the skull base to the nose bone pourer.

The mouth would be outlined with the triangles side by side forming a chain, and the teeth lightly delineated.


Both the sugar bowl and the milk jug would sit on a small rectangular porcelain serving tray, down the middle of which would be handwritten, the words;
 

“Would You Like Depth With That?”


The assistant would offer Orange Pekoe tea or Earl Grey, the sugar bowl would hold sugar cubes with small silver tongs hanging from its gilded knob and the milk would be fresh and cold.  


“Never grow a wishbone where a backbone ought to be.”


A fine phrase, as I cannot wish this tea set into existence.

In order to make it I will have to learn the skills of porcelain throwing on a potter’s wheel.

I will have to make molds for the spout and for the handles, large and small.

I will have to perfect the recipe for a pure white glaze suitable for majolica painting and I will have to test and retest my technique of application on test pieces that I make.

To fire the pieces without breakage is yet another area of difficulty and requires I learn about kiln temperatures for bisque and glazing.

My brushwork with the cobalt is the only existing skill I can bring straight to the tea set.


“So much to do, so little time.”


Although I have begun, these are matters that will take some time to accomplish to the standard that would illustrate the idea of the tea set that is so clearly visible inside my head.


“If you always do what you have always done,
You will always get what you have always got.”

Instead I will have to find something.

An object someone else has made. No doubt imbued with ideas that suited their purpose, but perhaps only superficially pertaining to mine.


“There will still be money when you are dead and gone.”


Functionally I can find objects whose purpose is to pour the tea and milk, and hold the sugar.

I can curate them into the structured exhibition of my book, and in a way, subsume the presence of any previous ownership by my will-full inclusion of them within the formal space.

They can be listed on the manifest of objects I am exhibiting, my name now next to their material presence as an owner of the object.

A title that dematerializes, decommissions, deconstructs, destroys, debates, the fact that someone else, once made the object.


“Life is short and death is long.”


Their name would be beyond forgotten, and the materiality of their objects, reclaimed by ‘I’ the colonizer of these clustered things in a room.

I haven’t yet seen these found objects that I will replace my unmade tea set with, I will have to go out from my studio and find them.

Meanwhile my tea set remains unmade until I have the skills to make these imagined objects, which continue to exist in a super position of certainly uncertain and possibly probable.


Oh well, it was only an idea.

“Would you like tea with that?”

 

Tell Me Exactly Where You Are

“Tell me exactly
Where you are!”
Yelled the man
Down the phone
To someone else
Standing alone

In a place, in a space,
He’s speaking
To an unseen face
With a conviction
That he will placate
Whoever it is,
Once he can locate them.

I am standing exactly
On Ponsonby road
On spat gum, on melted load
Of tarmac and shingle.

Unseen to the man, I mingle
On the crusted street
Below which clay and rock
And molten core meet.

I am not exactly here.
I am near to the man
With his ear to the phone
And his mouth a drone

But I’m only approximately near
I am more to the rear
Of what is considered the real.
The belief in the feel
Of substance on top of substance

Rather than the trance
That was replaced by a glance
At the extortion of exactitude,
Latitude and longitude
By the man on the phone,
Alone.

He wouldn’t have found me here.
He couldn’t have known precisely where.
To find my seeping ether.
I couldn’t have found me either

Because I wasn’t exactly there
Barely even aware
Of my physical walk
Towards a projection
That could talk
Into a case
And demand
The fettered physicality
Of someone else’s place

The eye of my face
Had a place in my skull
But the ‘I’ of my mind
Was adrift in a lull
And I could barely feel

The neutronic nest
Of my mind’s creature
Hidden safely,
Behind bone and feature.

The ‘I’ of me was a spatial reader
Containing no matter
And requiring none either.
My body just a portal
located in a place
Supporting the vertical
Physical trace

Of a head on a neck
With holes now attuned
To the seep of another,
The osmosis of the crude.

Demander of exactness,
Of feet nailed to the ground

And of that someone,
Somewhere,
Who must wait
To be impossibly
Exactly found

 

The Homunculus with the Pearl Necklace

 

I Had An Idea:

That I had become nostalgic, for the simplicity of forming an idea and then turning the idea into a form.

I had been missing the moment when the process of physically working on the form bred its own expansive ideas.

As though the work itself was now doing the thinking and going beyond my starting idea’s iterating conceptual mantra of ‘one idea per work’.

The material itself as I worked with it, would inevitably force me into collaboration with the work itself.

This would lead me into the realm of the infinity of ideas that can be reached within the finite constraints of one idea.

Paralleling the un-recognised endless numbers that lie between the more commonly known numerals of everyday math.

The idea that begins the work is often given all the credit for the value inherent in the end result, but in my practice the finished representation of the idea has had more to do with the physical collaborative labour, between the material of the form and myself.

And the initial idea becomes the more minimalist title that later accompanies the work.

The idea in this way becomes a one line worded abstraction of an idea and the paintings presentation of its smooth plane contains the layers, one on top of the other, either obscured or visible through the layer on top, that make up the depth of the idea, constructed in real time by a physical process of thought to hand to material.
 
I wondered how ‘the idea’ had gained such an eminent value within the market in which I present my forms.
   

In my research I discovered that the online Oxford Dictionary uses the following sentence to describe the word commodification:

“Art has become commodified”

This propelled me on a pursuit of a material object that could perhaps reflect,

 “The Commodification of Immateriality.”

The seeming impossibility of locating the physical matter of an idea, led me to begin with the boney carapace of the skull and a consideration of what is outside and inside this material cabinet in which we manufacture and store our immaterial thoughts.

The skull is the underlying foundation that determines the external fleshy physiology of the presentation mask constructed by the muscle and skin that we then manipulate, to articulate our thoughts.

Those pristine and certain ideas that we believe we have, uniquely manufactured behind the barrier of its calcified closed door.
 
I had an idea to make new masks that would suit the Meta ideas that our lives are perhaps unconsciously constructed within and under.

These masks would not need to mould and encase a recognisable biology, as they would be designed to fit the unseeable physiognomy of the face of an idea.

I called them:

“Masks Of Self-Construction”

My initial research sought to gain an understanding of what are the thought processes that give us our unshakeable and peculiarly human, ‘self-awareness’ known as Meta cognition.

This is a subject investigated by Philosophers, Psychologists and Neuroscientists, who in their separate fields have endeavored to pinpoint the location of what we identify as our ‘self’ which we perceive to be the place from where we generate ‘ideas’ we feel certain we have ownership over.

Cognition as a subject requires insight from both the speculative thinkers of philosophy and the evidence driven world of science, because when asked to describe consciousness, our answers reflect both a feeling of knowing it emanates from inside us, but also an existential feeling of it being somehow outside our bodies.  

Aristotle was the earliest philosopher to write about the thought beyond thought that is the realm of ‘Meta’, an area of research that has continued to inspire.

In recent times investigations have uncovered some incredible ways our brains construct what we believe to be the external reality that then influences our consciousness to formulate ideas, about which we become certain.

Investigations and experiments in all three fields of expertise have discovered how in many ways our core beliefs about the ‘self’ that we project do not hold up under the scrutiny of tests that unnerve the subject’s belief in their sole responsibility for their actions.

This then raises many puzzling questions about what it is that our eyes and therefore our brain, is processing as information and relaying to us as a unified experience.

An example of this is the conundrum that although we know light travels faster than sound, visual information takes longer to process than noise.

The consequence of the differing speeds comes together when we watch someone speak and watch their lips moving. The sound seems to be coming to us at the same time from that action, but this is a construction of the brain, as the event is only ‘apparently’ simultaneous. We ‘know’ but unconsciously ignore the fact that the sound and the visual information must have arrived in the brain at different times.

We also have to ask whether we directly perceive an object, and are we receiving the information about the object, directly and in the same instant that our eyes are ‘looking’ at the object?

And is our cognition of the events still in the same order as the sequence of events we have watched?

There is a great deal of uncertainty and debate about whether the brain replays received information in the same time frame or order and how much information is constructed from events that were not directly ‘seen’.
 

Where is my ‘self’, my factory of ideas?

Neuroscientists and Philosophers have sought the location of thought, by looking at both the physical source and the non-locatable physical feeling of its existence outside our bodies.

The Neuro-scientists can at least be sure that our brain and in particular three regions of it, is necessary for the fast recognition of composite ideas that we recognize as conscious thought.

These are, the lateral prefrontal cortex, the posterior parietal cortex and the internal thalamus.

Their activities best described in the words of a scientist:

“The signature of consciousness seems to be an ultrafast form of these brainwaves originating in the thalamus and spreading across the cortex. One of the most prominent attempts to turn this experimental data into a theory of consciousness is known as the “global neuronal workspace model”. This suggests that input from our eyes, ears and so on, is first processed unconsciously…It emerges into our conscious awareness only when it ignites activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortices, with these regions connecting through ultrafast brainwaves.”


As specific as this system appears, neurologists are nevertheless aware that although they have made large inroads into explaining how something so complex could be explained physically, the way we subjectively believe our mind works, is nothing like the actuality of the resulting ‘thought’.

Naive or direct realism is the term for describing our direct perception of an object and our belief that this simple process is our sensory perception relaying a truth back to us about the reality in front of us.

However it is not physically possible for our eyes to work in such a simple fashion and as is explained in the preceding paragraph, we forget that sight has more to do with our brain than our eyeballs, and consequently we are usually unaware of our brains involvement.

 
This can be illustrated by the fact that our visual perception is known to be a composite of the seen with the unseen, cleverly reconstructed by our brain.

The physiology of our eyes and their specific parts use light as a source of information for our brains to translate into something useful.

The millions of light sensors in our retina come in two shapes, cones and rods, with the rods needed to detect shades and forms and the cones detecting bright details and colours.

The optic nerve streams the information from the retina to the brain except for one small part where the nerve joins the retina. At this junction we have a blind spot in our vision and yet we are unaware of this, our brains use the information from both eyes to blend a seamless translation of perception.

There are numerous tests that illustrate some of the peculiar abilities our mind has to reconstruct what is occurring in front of us into something more palatable.

One is called the ‘Flash-lag illusion’ in which a disc is set with a spinning arrow that when passing a particular point is programmed to set off a flash at that precise moment. Yet this is not what the viewer sees, instead;

“The flash lags behind, apparently occurring after the arrow has passed…The explanation is that rather than extrapolating into the future, our brain is interpolating events in the past, assembling a story of what happened retrospectively.”

All of these curiosities make our ‘self-awareness’ difficult to locate physically as the sequence of events recorded by our eyes and reordered by our brains, occurs in a time frame we have no words to explain, in a place we can not yet find, and contains information we did not see at that instant.

And as science can only offer the brain as a location to probe but with inconclusive results, the investigations
are broadened by Philosophers who are less certain about the physicality of our consciousness, many referring to it as ‘seeping ether’ suggesting a miasma of feeling that surrounds and inhabits our physical body.

Both disciplines have potentially diluted Descartes well known philosophical dictum, ‘I think therefore I am’ to the less certain, ‘How I think I exist’.

These questions are important because our mind, our brain, our consciousness… are the locations of our beliefs, the big ideas that we ascribe to and the certainty of these beliefs in the light of these investigations starts to look less like a moral endowment birthed in our core, and instead a post-hoc, retrospectively constructed ‘something,’ cobbled together from ‘nothing’.

Yet this is the same ‘self’ that we intuitively feel is our innate cognitive being.

The quest for the source of meta-consciousness at this juncture segues into analogies.

Currently popular in the expertise of science are the analogies of a string of pearls or a twisted yarn of rope. These are used to signify a way of describing the inner feeling of believing we know, that we are who we think we are.

The string in the bead analogy represents the original simple beginning of a conscious realization of ‘self’ one that we are born with, and the pearls are the experiences and actions, and ideals, the matters and values that we master, and then thread onto the string as we grow.

The rope analogy differs, in that it allows for more complexity right from birth and a continual feeling of consciousness as the yarns of the many varied experiences are added and twisted together to constantly form one continual core rope of self.

This allows the separate talents we have progressed with to feel integral to the original ‘self’ as they cannot be easily viewed as separate add-ons. We feel as though we have always been the ‘one’ person we believe we are.

As social creatures we have amassed Meta constructions of consciousness that help us to elucidate common values to the wider group in which we consider ourselves members.

In the analogy of strung beads we string on physical accomplishments and amorphous ideals such as:
Magnanimity…selflessness…forgiveness…thou shalt not…etc
As representing pearl shaped values and abilities that can be acquired and strung on to the string of rope that is ‘your self’.

Presuming that when you have mastered your behaviour and modified it according to the requirements of the ‘pearl’ then you feel as if you have earned it and can therefore thread on the bead of accomplishment.

It is a description of a very measured and deliberate construction of a self-belief that this is who you are and desire to be, and will continue to be in your life. You could extrapolate from this that we culture a  ‘societal’ necklace by threading on the same or similar beads as our co-inhabitants.

However it could be counter argued that our cultural history is so entangled into our beings that it is questionable whether it is possible to consciously view these values and freely choose from a selection of pearls that we then obey with a delusion that we can both choose them and can also choose to dispose of them.

The myths we inherit are deeply integral to the physical lives we live that it is probably not possible to recognise the fragility of these pearly beliefs.

We may think we thread them on a single strand but more likely it is the complex twisted rope that they are joined into, threaded between the hardened stones of our quick responses that are likewise threaded and twisted through the strands of the same fibrous rope, onto which we have deliberately slid these shiny beads of our desired self.

The masks that I, and the clay finally collaborated on are representations of ideas around ideal consciousness.

Masks of self-construction that may perhaps prove useful to cover our pixilated ‘Selfies’, the digitized stream of consciousness images we share as if to prove the adage:

“I am here therefore I am really here”

The masks evolved a form that reflects the physical shape of attempting to fit around ‘nothingness’.

So here are these white-washed clay masks with their shiny eyes that relay the external into the internal:

“The Masks Of Self-Construction”

“Plato’s Insight”

Plato defined knowledge as “justified true belief” but when we test our justifications of our beliefs by questioning whether our perceptions were ‘true’ perceptions, we now know that we can be deceived about that ‘truth’ which has been relayed by our eyes, but replayed under the control of our brains and our unconscious minds.

This mask plays with the idea of the external self and the internal self. One side is convex the other concave.
The eyes are set either side of a stalk, but one set dwells in the shadow world of the internal cave and at the other end, piercing the boney hemisphere, are the stereoscopic eyes looking out to the heavens and the lair of the Demi-urge and the mathematical objects that defy materiality.

Importantly the wearer of the mask owns both sets of eyes. The eyes that can see externally, can peer beyond the cave and therefore can seek to understand the matter of the perfect forms that they can merely see reflections of internally.

A fifth eye peers out of the cave mouth as a protective watchdog against intruders to the ‘self’.

Ergo ate some for Descartes.

This mask is shaped with the eyes like a sight on a gun. They can turn into three positions, up, down, or straight ahead.

Heaven, Earth or You.

There is no available internal space for any other matter as this has been pressed away by the flattening sides.

The remaining eyes are in the mouth.

These masks couldn’t fit a human face. They are not shaped to fit a physiognomy they are made to fit an idea espoused by philosophy or science. ‘Ergo Ate Sum’ is formed around Descartes dictum ‘I think therefore I am’, in the mask, the eyes, the windows of Descartes’ Homunculus soul, are in the mouth as though we eat up our experiences and swallow them into ourselves, ready to dredge up and disgorge out in our poetry and artworks and makings and writings.

This is Descartes theorem that we can only taste our own
reality; we cannot prove that anything else exists.

In the world of physics including the quantum world this is potentially very apt as this is the reality of information science.  

For example, we can agree the physical cones and rods of our eyes have evolved to see the information of the atoms on a surface, the arrangement of which reflects back what we discern as ‘red’ in the colour spectrum, so yes we can all agree that we are seeing the information that we have agreed to call ‘red’ but we have to accept that each of our experiences of that colour can not be compared as an objective sensation.

Dark Matter Wimp Hunter.

This mask is fashioned after a huge piece of equipment called ‘Dark Side 50’ that contains highly sensitive lights containing argon gas.

These are aimed at each other inside a steel hemisphere situated deep under an Italian mountain.

The machine’s raison d’être is to catch a trace of a W.I.M.P. falling through the steel shell, piercing through many layers of what we perceive to be solid matter.

This is similar to the way we describe the feeling of consciousness. Yes we can see areas light up on a brain scan, but the thoughts we have are acknowledged as fleeting and varied and have no known physicality to them.

The particles of our brain matter are perhaps the conductors of our thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not particulate.

Consequently we have a sense of thought being both inside and outside our boney hemisphere and we are heard to say that we are trying to ‘capture our thoughts’.

This would be a mask for hunters of ideas, intellect seekers who sit and scan the surrounding ether from within their dark hide, hoping their fluorescent lure will attract a wimp and that the invisible will become visible.

(W.I.M.P. = Weakly Interactive massive particles.)

Archimedes’ Tears And Giving The Glad Eye.

A mask that plays on the ancient Greek scientist and philosopher’s invention of a spring shaped pump known as ‘Archimedes’ screw’ that circulated water around the mechanism and drew it up the hill.

The eyes in this mask are located unhinged in the socket and can look up to the heavens or down to earth or to the side, behind or in front, but never together in one direction.
The eyes are controlled consciously and deliberately by manual manipulation that allows them a ‘one-eyed’ focus.

The tears are screwed around, down and through the eyeholes, to draw water upwards from a wellspring of emotional thought, which has been flooded by the Amagladae.


Giving the Glad Eye.

‘Giving the glad eye’ is an old fashioned phrase, a jokey familiarity from one to another about flirtation which may lead to mating, which certainly feels like existing with its emotive fluctuations between desire, love, empathy, manipulation, maliciousness and self interested control.

The Amagladae are two small almond shaped areas in the
Limbic system of the brain that is reputedly responsible for our neurotic self-awareness expressed through the emotions of fear and aggression.

The Amagladae is the rapid response trigger to these emotional states that so often end in tears.

Archimedes’ screw would offer some relief as it reticulates the water back up towards the eyes, which can be refreshed, before being manually focused towards a new one-eyed direction.

Bone Drone Ether Reader.

This mask reflects on our biological pride and reliance on the form that carries our senses and the credit we bestow on the skull for being the perceived carrier of our possibly unique conscious condition we know as ‘Theory of mind’.

In this mask, the bone continues through the bone of the skull, the hard materiality of our matter to which we have given a credence we feel is indisputable but physics can prove disputable.

The eyes are located around the outside of the familiar shape which has here lost it’s commodious capacity, and instead the eyes look out in all directions from their static placement and in doing so, transfer a combined holographic sight directly into the material of the flattened bony matter.

It is an intriguing fact that the order of the information gathered by our eyes, can be reordered by our brains into sequences that we mistake as being true and indisputable conceptions of an actuality that we convince ourselves must have happened.

This is the perplexing area known as the Beta phenomenon, for example:

“For us to experience events as happening in a specific order, it is not necessary that information about those events enters our brain in that same order.”
Eg ‘The man ran out of the house after he kissed his wife.’ So the given sequence is, running –kissing, but we understand it as kissing – running.”

Psychologists have observed subjects participating in what is known as ‘the beta phenomenon test’, in which a red dot appearing and then disappearing in one corner of a screen is followed by a green dot appearing almost instantly in the other corner.

Subjects watching the sequence report that they see a change over from red to green in the middle section of the screen as a sequential change over, but this is not possible as they cannot know that the second dot will be green so it is not possible to see it prior to the event.

An even more astonishing test is ‘the manipulated cursor test’, where the subject listening to instructions coming through headphones is asked to point at images using a cursor.

Unbeknown to the subject, the researcher is the speaker and has dual control and they occasionally move the cursor towards a picture and if the subject has heard the word that describes the image just prior to seeing the cursor move, they insist that it was them that moved it there.

This is a fascinating insight into our ability to form a belief that we intended actions we claim to be ours, but we never actually performed those actions.

“The test reveals one way that the brain does not always display its actual operations to us, instead it produces a post hoc ‘ I did this’ narrative lacking any factual basis for it.”

This same delusion appears in our dislocation from responsibility for our actions and is aptly evidenced in an anecdote from a headmaster.
He relayed to me his observation of young teens being held to account for their actions in a misdemeanor, who were adamant that they didn’t do the actions and subsequently astonished when shown video evidence of them doing the act they believed they had not committed.

The lack of memory and the need for evidence to show them what they actually did, was still not enough to remove the feeling of dislocation from what they had clearly actually done.

Is Someone Watching Us From Inside Our Skull?    

One answering theory to the phenomenon of the Beta test, and other perplexing questions, is the idea of the little autonomous homunculus sitting inside our heads and watching all events as though everything is appearing on a theatre in our brain and the ‘little man’ the only viewer.

His unrelenting job is to reorder everything the senses play him, into something that is more efficiently comprehensible and he then replays this reordered information back to us as an instant ‘truth’ of what we believe we have seen.

There is plenty of reasoned opposition to the Homunculus theory, but if we decide to follow it as an idea and the ‘little man’ is pulled out from the skull and exposed as a manufacturer of thought, it allows the misty immateriality of cognition, to be artificially created in a material.

Because of this I have decided that perhaps the simplest constructed form of my starting idea is in the end, not a range of Meta-masks, but rather a small white clay Homunculus figure I had made in the years before I had made the question, the true sequence being:
 
“She made the work then she had an idea about the work.”

It is titled:

The Homunculus With The Pearl Necklace.

The lumpen clay figure can see her ‘self’ in a little hand mirror, reflecting back a pink-flesh coloured mammalian mask and thus attests to her-self that she exists in this form.

She can transcribe with the white quill in her other hand, her ethereal thoughts transmuted into concretised words that externalize her beliefs of what it is that she idealises as reality.

She can now export those beliefs to others.    

She wears a string of pearls embedded in her skin. Each one a talisman of her favoured acquired features, her abilities, her beliefs, her self-constructions.

She can export her written pearls to be threaded onto the strings of others who have bought the bead of her ideas.

She has commodified her immateriality and…

She can be bought.

Oh well it was only an idea.

 

The Pointing Finger of Transmogrification

I Had An Idea:

To stitch and sculpt an art ‘relic’ titled:  
‘The pointing finger of transmogrification.’

Because I had begun to ask:

Are objects showing signs of depression?
Does the creation of objects need to go to therapy?

Is there perhaps a buried relic from the mystic ages of art history that can be excavated, to restore potency to my own flaccid skins of canvas and crumpled clay?”

Which leads me to:

Could the confusion of so much analysis, so much introspection, be slumping the forms, hesitating the hands from making objects.

And hindering our ability to solve insights through the making of objects?

Which leads me to:

Are we taking our confusion out on our objects?

Which leads me to:

I am not certain whether we create art using both insight and introspection.

And in that case is it an equal split or does one dominate because one of these methods is more influenced by external factors to dominate.

And therefore it swerves the artwork towards a certain direction?

Which leads me to:

But then again the question could be, do we create work using introspection or insight?

And are the works created using either one or the other manifestly different works?

Which leads me to:

Do works created using introspection currently have more ‘value’ that those that rely on insight to be created?

Which leads me to:

Do the insight works currently have to explain themselves using introspection and analysis, the answers to which then dominate the work so it retreats to the background becoming a victim of analysis?

Which leads me to:

Is this over analysis both before and after the creating of work, exhausting the artist, and therefore manifesting in installations that mimic poverty, paucity, slumped shoulders, lowered eyes, quietness and scarcity?

Are these hobo artworks a reflection of our loss of self-belief reformed into humble, hiding objects with a barely-there, presence.

Which leads me to:

How can it be possible for the blue space of the mind to float in its ether of wonderment and have an insight to answer the puzzle of a creation, amidst an endless critical chatter that leeches into the same space?

Which leads me to:

So many questions an artwork has to answer for.


Which leads me to:

Presently you would think that artists have an unprecedented freedom to make, find, appropriate, destroy, imagine, or physically do, pretty much anything and claim it as art.

But we do this within an economic and academic context that exerts an imperceptible judgmental control over those actions.

In an era where the idea of the idea is given supremacy over the object of an idea, the minds producing the ‘ideas’ would be challenged to say that they had been free of any voice other than their own, during the creation of their work.

Which leads me to:

More than ever the introspection part of our minds is taken up with questions about the audience we are trying to reach, the criticism we are likely to receive, the way we can fit our work into the currently favoured academic zeitgeist.

And whether we should even make an object, let alone how we would make it.

The simplicity of forming an idea and then forming the idea into a form is lost inside an intellectual and overly analytical, psycho-babble.

There are many questions that eat away at our self-confidence and at the personal integrity of our work.

The insight within the work, that you could argue, gives a piece it’s punctum, its arête, its point of difference, is ebbed of its steadfastness and surety.
It is as though the biological punctum in the eye has become physically blocked and a haze covers all that it attempts to scan.


Which leads me to:

We are often as an audience viewing works that metaphorically have their shoulders hunched, their forms melted and installations that are dashed together to illustrate that it doesn’t matter.

My own drawings have become twisted figures battling each other as mirrored twins in a Rorschach drama on paper.

Thin lines on thin paper, now stacked in a box as though it is of no matter.

But it must have mattered, these physical things were still being made or collected, they were chosen to ‘BE’ a participant in an artist’s visualized idea.
 
Art reflects someone wanting to reflect an idea or value back to someone else.

Made on their behalf (the audience), and also made on their behalf (the artists). The artists existing state of mind is the only available material with which to start the work, and this mind-material works in tandem and with equality, with the concept of ‘why’ they wanted to do the work.

Which leads me to:

I wonder if in order to make these slouched works of art: did magnificence need to die?  

It is not an offensive question, it is relevant because one could say magnificence is an ideal of the old order and no longer reflects our understanding of the cosmos that we are such a barely distinguishable part of.

It is possible that such ideals are now confined to history, and instead we must resign ourselves to a reality that reflects our understanding of the disheveled brutality and uncertainty that we now recognize as the chaos of existence.

Not only, are we no longer worshipped by the Heliocentric sun, our uniqueness is further diminished by growing knowledge of how many millions of potential ‘earths’ orbit stars in our universe.

Our physical beings now seem to carry a heaviness that is beyond gravity, as though the warped fields of string theory have fallen from the sky and are pressing on our puny forms with a net of immense weight.

We know ourselves now as insignificant insects in a web of heavy nothingness and this diminished self-importance perhaps restricts our stretching upright into the creatures of backbone that once pulled geometry out of our bone hard skulls.

Which leads me to:

Perhaps unconsciously our bones and therefore our minds are weighted by the grave heaviness of the space known and unknown that surrounds us.

The knowledge overwhelming our physicality and represented in the physical forms we exhibit.

We now have no reason to believe in an external figure of ‘glory’ that sits outside our own egos, and correspondingly we no longer suppress our ego to create treasures for this imagined magnificence.

Which leads me to:

But glory as an ideal still appeals to us, we seek others who have been anointed with it and it would be a positive admission to acknowledge we wish glory for ourselves as through it we confirm our worthiness and give our fragile feeling of self, solace, by confirmation of our existence through the accepting eyes of others.

We wish the same glory to transfer to and from our creations and for them to be held and treasured in the safety and bestowed longevity of, adoration.

All around us the publicity of others challenges us to seek fame for our work and the thing that hinders these aspirations that we unconsciously harbor, is our self.

Not long after beginning a new work, we start to analyse our beliefs and thus begins the slow corrosion of our insight.

 
Which leads me to:

This rusting analysis starts to corrupt almost instantaneously following the initial big bang that initiates the transforming of a piece of matter into ‘something’ that matters.

Questions come almost unbidden into the pristine vacuum of ‘nothing’ in which we have incubated our idea for a body of work.

We start to evaluate the idea and its worthiness next to work made by others whom we admire or others that someone else admires.

Or we study the current art philosophies and twist ourselves to fit the words of someone else.

We begin to alter our work, transforming it in light of the influences of the market and the voices we have let into our heads.

Which leads me to:

We do this analysis because it is a difficult battle we have inside our heads as we endeavor to reflect by a physical external form, the glory of ourselves transmogrified into our work in order to attain glory for ourselves for our work in order that a form of our work survives and in order that we survive in a form.

Which leads me to:

At its worst this is the psychological death spiral of narcissism.

At its best it is a psychological appreciation of the wonderment of our consciousness of our existence.

It is though we form both, an internal monologue and exhibit an externalized form that mimics the double helix of our DNA.

And within that monologue it is as though we can particulate the strands of our thoughts into a twisting, long spiral with connecting pathways between the two sides of introspection and insight, the pathways allowing updates back and forth as the internal debate queries the worthiness and unworthiness of our ponderings, and of our decisions.

Meanwhile our perception moves endlessly up and down the length, back and forth as if watching a spinning helix in the light of day,

Which leads me to:

It is mentally very difficult to control the forces that have begun the spin of the double helix in your mind.

It requires stillness to quiet the two sides so that we can choose some certainty of direction.

If we have stopped increasing the length of the strand by not adding any more arguments to the rope, and we have found a method to remove any more external voices asking to be ‘liked’, and we have evolved a way to hold the twist steady so it no longer dazzles us by its flashy spiraling, then we can perhaps as artists, regain a balance between introspection and insight into what it is we value to express in our work.

The work can contain glory within itself quietly, made, found, structured, unstructured, perfect, imperfect, just because it exists and was made consciously from within the reality we uniquely inhabit.

The objects themselves could then physically stand and bear the pressing heaviness of the forces that weigh so heavily on the shoulders and suffocate the air from the mere mortal who made them or anointed them as artworks.

Which leads me to:

Breathe in breathe out.

There is something to be gained from making artifacts that celebrate the oxygen in our blood, the rigidity of our skeleton, the blood that circulates our brains and the backbone that holds it erect.

To celebrate the conversions of gases and cosmic dust, the particles, the atoms, the molecules that cluster, the dark matter that hides, the light waves that we can see, the radioactive hiss that we can hear, the endlessness of space now that we know it is with us and we within it.

It is magnificent to be alive for such a brief moment of time and this is a something that we can still hold as valuable, in a reflection returning to us from objects that introspection and insight fought to bring into existence.

Which leads me to:

The skeletons of artists are bearing the weighty science of art. The words are suffocating us, clotting our arteries, entangling lines around our heads.
 
An inquisition by scholars and economists has pushed mysticism underground to lonely lairs.

And the inquisition that is our own relentless inner monologue of self-justification and self-correction, keeps us in there.

Which leads me to:

Breathe in, breathe out, inhale, and exhale…

I suggest we keep searching for and keep working for the elusive pointing finger of transmogrification.

Severed from some magnificent being in a time of glory, it is rumoured that when held in any mere mortal’s hand its crag skinned withered bone and keratin nail can point and claim beauty to be beheld in any object whatsoever.

Cut off your own blood engorged finger at the knuckle and prepare the torn surface to attach this immortalized detector of beauty and point, point, point at your work.

Glory be, glory be, glory be.


But alas, I fear this marvelous relic is a long buried fossil with its empowering flesh transformed to cold hard stone, and I have found I cannot stitch myself an effective replacement from the lowly materials at hand…

Woe is me, woe is me, woe is me.

Oh well it as only an idea

 

To Object or not to Object

I Had An Idea:

To answer a question;
 
To object or not to object, that is the question.

I object!
You object!

I, an object too,
You, an object too.

I object to…?
You object to…?

I.
I the object
I object to.

You.
You the object
You object to.
 
I the object
You object to

You the object
I object to.

I the object
You the object

We are both
Objects, of objections.

I the subject
You the subject

I, a subject, too and
You, a subject too,

I am subject to…?
You are subject to…?

I,
I the subject
I am subjected to

You,
You the subject
You are subjected to.

I,
I the subject
Of your subjection!

You,
You the subject
Of my subjection!

I the subject
I object to

You the subject
You object to.

I the subject
You object to

You the subject
I object to.

You the subject
I the subject

You the object
I the object

We are both
Subjects of objections

We are both
Objects of subjections

Subjects of objects

Objects of subjects

Objects of objects

Subjects, of subjects.

We are both.
Both?
Both!


Oh well, it was only an idea.

 

The Unobserved and the Unfound

I Had An Idea:

To paint an imagined image;

Starting from two recorded dreams, ‘The Unfound’ and ‘The Unobserved’.

They were imagined while I was in the unconscious state of sleep and were perfectly clear on waking before being imperfectly recorded.

I am uncertain whether I can re conjure them from a conscious state and I am uncertain whether I can access my memory of the unconscious state?
 
The dreams were never really an idea so I have no idea.

The Unobserved

I dreamt of pestilence, pests infesting deep into the dark of my sleep wherein I was happy hosting friends and preparing to feed them more from the remains of a feast. We were outdoors; someone brought my attention to a turkey that we had cooked a few days before. It had plenty of white meat on it.

The turkey was inside a cotton cover but when we removed it, I could see an oily fizzing spout coming through from just beneath the browned skin, near the top of a bone.

This mound was hissing with small amounts of fizzing liquid.

I recognised it was going to erupt and tried to re-cover the meat with the cloth, but was too late as breaking through the skin, blue bottle flies flew out in hoards and then from another site and another… hoards and hoards of buzzing bluebottles.

Disgustingly unstoppable and the noise a frightening penetrating hum.

We run.

The Unfound

In a later dream I am in a shabby bathroom with bluish green-gray darkness.

I hear a noise I shouldn’t hear and bend down to move a box to peer behind it. A rat leaps out and runs off.

I think to myself that I can live with this one rat loose somewhere in my house but then see another smaller rat run out, and then another and then another…

I am overwhelmed by the realisation that I can’t live with so many rats as they are going to take over the house. I will have to act, so I look behind the bath for the source.

Here I find a small grey lead metal pipe that comes through the wall from the dark and it is from this opening that another rat appears.

I grab a towel to block the hole – but even more rats are trying to pour through, one behind the other. The one at the front of the queue, now blocked by my hand in the towel, bites my finger.

I can feel his toothy grip through the towel so with my finger I push downwards pressing hard against his lower jaw and feel the bones disconnect as I break it downwards. But still he persists.

The rats queuing behind now begin to pour through the hole pushing the biting rat and my towel and hand, out of their determined path. Pushing past my resistance. Pouring into the room. So many…

I ask myself why is there pestilence in my dreams, why are eaters of decaying flesh pouring into my dream life?

Finding the Observable

In order to convert the dream into an image, I will need to be conscious.

I will need to look for images of the particular components of the dreams so that I can record the details visually in a recognisable way and I will need to convert my reference materials into a 2d format line by line.

Drawing becomes maths when drawing from the real. It involves calculations and measurements and the tricks of transcribing geometric shapes that change a 3D object into a 2D representation.

If not directly copying an object but instead the drawing seems to come directly from the head to hand to paper, you are nevertheless still a mathematician pulling out the free flowing forms that then coalesce into recognisable patterns.

These may come from a memory of geometric shapes that you have studied in the past, or memories of the forms you are wanting to reference and record, the maths encoded in the scales of lines that build the recognisable shape in front of us.


Finding the Unfound


I will need to choose a scene, which will come about by running as much as I can remember from the dream, through my head, until I can frame a part of it to stand for the narrative of the whole.

I am certain I will paint in oils but…

I am uncertain about the size of the painting.

I am certain of the colours as I can recall the muddied greys of the dimly lit bathroom, the muted blue grey painted wall, and the lead grey pipe.
Or the shiny glistening burnt sienna of the turkey, the blue blackness of the flies.

I am uncertain how well I can depict the rushing rats and will need to look at reference images.

I am uncertain how to paint the sound of the flies.

I am uncertain how to convey the fear.

I am certain the preparation of the canvas will require a week of layering white gesso and then sanding.

I am certain that the first coat of oil paint will be a dirty umber.

I am uncertain what forms I will first sketch on.

I am uncertain how many times I will paint over the images I have laid down, repainting and starting again.

I am certain that I won’t recognise the painting at some stage.

I am certain that the painting will reach a point where it becomes itself, separate from the dream and separate from any slavish plan to copy the dream.

I am not certain what the painting will look like at this stage.

I am certain that from this point the painting will lead me to finish it.

I am certain it will have become a puzzle with its own solution encoded within the geometry of the canvas.

I am not certain who would be the audience for this painting.

I am not certain what it will be about.

I am certain I will recognise it as finished.

I am not certain anyone else will want the painting.

Finding Certainty

As I am conscious, I have to wonder why I would go to the trouble of illustrating and making publically visible these unconscious images.

As I am conscious, I suppose it would be more worthy to consciously cognate a more certain idea.

As I am conscious in that case the idea could be expressed as an object or in an object that would no longer necessarily need to be a painting.

I am conscious that a painting is a peculiarly uncertain medium that keeps changing its idea.

I am conscious “One idea per work” would encourage one idea per audience, which would lead one audience to one idea.

I am certain that would work.

I am certainly conscious that would work.

I am uncertain whether that is what I want to do.

I am uncertain.

I am certain I am uncertain.


Oh well it was only an idea.

 

Today's thoughts

“His method consists in sanctifying mistakes. It is through mistakes that man escapes from idle obedience to a code. If he is strong enough, the mistake will cease to be a mistake and will become an example. Hence the revulsion of the many who would rather recognise than know. To recognise is easy. To know demands an effort of the eyes and the mind, a long effort of study.

Few people will admit that what a Realist picture represents is as strange to see as a Cubist picture, or that it presupposes an ancestral habit of which the organism is not aware.
That is what made Picasso say to a visitor who had confessed that he ‘did not understand him’ and who later showed him a photograph of his wife: ‘ Oh how small she is! I suppose it’s so that she can fit into your pocket.’”

Jean Cocteau.
 

“At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.”

VVG

 

To Whom It May Concern

I Had An Idea:

To create a painting, in the spirit of ().


Painting Description.

I would begin on a ()() x ()() stretched canvas.

I would layer this with () coats of () which would be hand sanded between each successive layer.

The finish would be () and () to the touch.

I would start the first layer of () () Colour as a base coat before adding () which I would have () from (). This process would take some time to position and () to a ().

I would then begin to paint () in and around the (). Building up a (), that I would then layer () () paint over.

The fine painting of () would require many weeks in order to () the ().

Every () of the surface would be () and the (), would be very () and () to today’s () ().   

Hopefully whilst creating the piece I too would have reached a () about () and can feel that I have () a () that will () () some () () to the ().

The final () will be () and consist of two () of () although some areas will still be () and () () so that the (), and () contrast () () ().

The finished painting would be () and a thing that () () (), but that is of little consequence.

Hanging Instructions

The painting would be titled ().

I would choose to () the painting with it’s () () pressed to the () denying the () an (),
and denying the () a ().

Both the (), and the (), should feel () by their inability to () the (), of their () denial.

Although they will be made aware that at () time during it’s (), () ()-()-() member of the (), will be allowed to see the () for a () period before it () to its position () the ().

It is hoped that they will () it.

Oh well it was only an idea.

 

Letter to Theo

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.” 

Amanda Geftner..

“If reality isn’t, at bottom, mathematics, what is it? ‘Maybe someday we’ll encounter an alien civilization and we’ll show them what we have discovered about the universe,’ Greene says, ‘they’ll say, ‘Ah Math. We tried that. It only takes you so far. Here’s the real thing.’ What would that be? It’s hard to imagine. Our understanding of fundamental reality is at an early stage.”

Amanda Geftner quoting Brian Greene a Physicist at Columbia University NewYork

 

To Whom It May Concern II

I Had An Idea:

To attempt to make a painting that could be transmogrified into a conceptual artwork.

I envisage a square stretched canvas 1m x 1m.

I would prepare its surface with 7 layers of gesso, sanding between each layer.

I would then apply some good oil paint in indigo blue.
At this stage it may well look very similar to my ‘abstract’ painting but I would intend for you to think about it differently. 

I would then take it out from my studio to a tree lined, well populated park, and would loop a rope around its square neck and hang it from one of the trees.

There it could remain until it was ‘found’ and removed by a trolley or taxi or bus or bike or by foot or by dump-truck, to another location, that had nothing to do with the making or hanging, of art.

This may have been one of my more successful works, but I discovered I had used mineral oil paint, which wasn’t what I thought I originally had.

Oh well it was only an idea.

Those cold theologians

I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can't' once and for all.

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, “defiles” - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.

http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/14/378.htm.

 

To Whom It May Concern:

I Had An Idea:

To paint a sublime abstract painting.

I envisage a square stretched canvas 1m x 1m.

I would layer it with 7 coats of gesso, each one sanded before the next coat.

The surface would be very smooth in appearance, and in feel.

I would then brush on indigo oil paint, layering the paint thinned with medium, until the surface was perfectly and deeply covered. This will take many weeks. 

I would use a fine bristled finishing brush on each layer to minimize and disguise from view, any visible brush marks. 

It would be as if I had never been there.

Finally when it was nearly dry, I would hand burnish it with my palm to further remove any trace of the maker.
Then I would imagine it to be ready.

Within the painting, the atomized matter of its objective existence would, possibly, for the observer taking a moment to contemplate its surface, contain the sublimity of an idea. 

You could by a stretch of the imagination say that it contains within the atomized blue materiality of its surface, its own sequence of infinite numbers.

The finite appearance of the shallow depth within the layers of paint, and the breadth, of the blue paint across the face of the canvas both belie the truth of the layers and layers of fractal shapes that replicate infinitely within the substance of the painting.

At its edges and within its shallow core, the particles in the space endlessly divide into the numbers that lie between the finite numbers we use to count the layers.

The work if I made it, would have a simple title such as
‘A Painting’.

Oh well it was only an idea.

“DID I HAVE ANY IDEA?”

To Whom It May Concern:


I Had An Idea:

To ask; “Did I have any idea?”

Does an idea matter?

Does an idea have matter?

Does an idea exist as ‘something?

Does an idea exist in the realm of ‘nothing’?

Is an idea a ‘something’ that is fully formed and in the atomic realm?

Is an idea closer in substance to the sub atomic quantum world?

Is an idea certain?

Is an idea uncertain?

How can you be certain of an idea when at the quantum level, below our atomic mass of which we feel so certain, two states exist simultaneously, certainty and uncertainty?

Can we be any more than possibly, probably certain about our idea?

Is it probable that an idea will become effective and affect something?

Is it only possible that an idea will become effective and affect something? 

Is an idea once articulated, the end of the idea as it was first formed? 

Does the idea, post-original articulation, become collaboration?

Is an idea always in a super position of neither, dead or alive, until the box in which it is placed, is opened?

Does the idea become one way or the other after it is observed? 

In that case what was the idea that first went into the box? 

Can it ever be bracketed and isolated as an entire fully realized ‘something’?

Is an idea amorphous?

Does the idea appear, disappear and reappear continuously in the way that positive and negative quarks instantly appear inside a vacuum of what should be nothingness?

Can you hold onto the idea?

Does it have a beginning and an end?

Is an idea finite?

Does an idea arrive in our minds, bracketed within a vast fuzzy field of infinite probability and improbability?

What makes it probable that an idea will exist?

What takes the idea from the amorphous vacuum in which it is generated and makes it effective and therefore affecting?

Does the idea pick up matter?

Does it materialize?

Does this happen after the idea was first formed?

Does the idea still exist within the brackets of its initial inception?

Has the idea leaked?

Has the idea been altered by contamination?

Can an observer in a world external to the originator of the idea, now open the box to observe the idea?

Does the idea have a material presence so that it can be placed into the box?

Is the idea now an object?

Does the idea have matter?

Does the idea now matter?

Did the idea have matter before it was placed into the box?

Was that matter the originators, own electrons and neurons and protons, particles and sub atomic particles…?

If it took matter to cognate the idea, then is the idea made of matter?

Does the idea have its own matter?

Is an idea particulate?

Can the senses of the observer disseminate the particulation of the idea, without the originator expanding the size of the particles and therefore altering the idea from inside its original finite bracketed state?

Can the idea be a fractal?

Can the expansion of the particulate be a precise repetition of its shape and therefore retain the integrity of the idea at every scale?

Does the original idea need to be enlarged into a form that can be observed?

Does the idea need matter?

Does that matter need to be altered?

Does the idea exist?

Does the idea need an external form to show that it exists?

What is the matter the observer takes from the box?

Is it still an idea?

Or is it an object of an idea?

If the material matter of an object exists infinitely in itself but finitely within the containment of the universe, does an idea exist if it is immaterial?

Do we have any idea, of whether an idea exists?

Is an idea immaterial?

Is an object immortal?

Can I be certain of your idea?

Can I believe your idea with certainty?

Can I buy one?

If I bought your idea, did I buy the idea or a physical manifestation of your idea?

Is the idea’s matter transmogrified into the ink particles?

Has the material substance changed the idea?

Does the idea still exist?

Or is it an object that exists?

I’m not certain.

Can I possibly buy one?


Oh well it was only an idea.


Delia Woodham