my art.

I know it’s a really scary thing for you to find out that your child isn’t going to church anymore, and it’s a knee-jerk reaction for you to tell him to march right back in there. But here are some reasons why that might not be the best idea.

1.     The act of going to church does nothing for my personal relationship with God if I do not care for it.

2.     By telling me what to do, you color church a not-so-great shade of have-to-do’s. You perpetuate the reluctant churchgoer. If I were to go to church, I want to be genuinely motivated. I want to be sincere.

3.    It reflects on what you value. I do not see how you could be more concerned with my going to church than how I feel about God.  If you were to be truly satisfied that I went to church every week but had nothing to do with God, what does this say about you? Are we doing it for show? Are we doing it so we can tell your friends we are a stable, church-going family? Where are the priorities here?

4.    By enforcing your authority, you belittle me, and I cannot allow that. It took me a while to even attempt talking to you, and you should not mistake my willingness to explain to you what I’m thinking as weakness or as a plea for you to lead my life for me.

5.    You will push me away.

The bible says, “Do not exasperate your children, so that they will not lose heart.” Here I am telling you plainly and honestly that I am less likely to lose heart, and more likely to start finding it somewhere else.

Sometimes, discretion is the better part of good parenting. 

I hope that someday you will realize that, but on your own, because I’m not one to tell you how to live your life, or raise your own children.

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I know you mean well, but you should really stop telling me to go to church.

If there’s a thing I’ve always had a problem with, it’s been others telling me exactly what to do. I’m terrible at doing that. I mean, you could tell me the parameters of a project, or what you need by the end of the assignment, but just try to tell me how to live my life, and you will lose me.

I don’t even mean in conversation. I mean that sometimes I will go out of my way to avoid being in contact with you. You will become death to me, like anti-matter and matter. You will represent everything I never want to become.

There is a dignity in learning things for yourself. It may not be perfect, or the easiest way, but it is definitively yours. This personalization of experience, when coupled with an artistic preoccupation with the vague concept of process and progression, means that I get into a lot of head-butting contests with people in authority – in familial and religious arenas in particular.

It means that I don’t like people telling me what to do.

I’m not trying to invalidate what you’re saying. What I want is for you to validate mine by allowing me to express what I think, whether it includes input from what you’ve said, or not.  

I know you mean well, but you should really stop telling me to go to church.

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Today, more than any other day before this, I felt the urge to walk calmly out of my door, pick a direction, and put one foot in front of the other, never looking back.

Tell me about the pressures of reality, and I’ll tell you about the freedom of ideal in turn.

Tell me how reality necessitates the compromise of ideal, and I’ll tell you how much of what we think we need are just things. I’ve seen what your purported reality does to people. It isn’t pretty.  I’ve seen life eat away at people until they become cantankerous and contentious. I’ve seen the big things blinkered from existence as people grow into this so-called maturity, until only the important things remain, like how come this rojak is so salty, or the price of gas now is so expensive, or that man who just cut into your lane is an asshole and probably had a mother who didn’t love him.

I’ve seen people who started placing more importance on five minutes of their time instead of the five people who walk past them while they were complaining.

So you and Maslow can go on harping about that hierarchy of yours, but I’ll tell you this: there’s more to being alive than food and water, because there’s more to you than your body. If you neglect the better things for the seemingly needful things, then what you are is an uninhabited shell, a soul in a vegetative state clinging on to existence with the help of a life-support machine in the shape of a suit and tie.

In truth, I’m not even talking about an office job. I’m talking about people who start going through the motions. In any arena there will be those who create, and those who exist.

Maybe someday I will walk out that door, because death by exposure would be infinitely preferable to slow death by mere survival.  After all, you were there, too, weren’t you, when we heard someone wiser than us say, “If you try to save your life, you are going to lose it, but if you lose your life, you will, in the process, save it.”

Or something like that.

I am determined to die, however young, with a smile on my face, and none of your reality affords me that.

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flux

Art changes you.

If you do art that challenges boundaries, you have to expect your boundaries to change in turn.

What they don’t tell you is that in this process you have to expend yourself to expand yourself.

If you are brave enough to let it, art will ravage you without remorse. There will be nothing left that you think sacrosanct. The once-steadfast pillars that you thought made up your identity – religion, ethics, morality, tradition, are rendered in a constant state of nonnegotiable flux. It seems as though the only thing left that can be considered quintessentially you, is the manner in which you assimilate and express issues. 

Where is the dignity in that?

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Parenthood means growing up with someone you might not like, but love anyway. That’s a very scary thing.

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Life as I know it

“Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, ‘Son, thou art welcome.’ But I said, ‘Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash.’ He answered, ‘Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.’ Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, ‘Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one?’ The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, ‘It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites — I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child?’ I said, ‘Lord, thou knowest how much I understand.’ But I said also (for truth constrained me), ‘Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.’ ‘Beloved,’ said the Glorious One, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’”

-Emeth, the Calormene, describing his encounter with Aslan

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“Keep your head up, keep your heart strong

Keep your mind set in your ways

Keep your heart strong,”

-Ben Howard, “Keep your head up”

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“Hold your own

Know your name

And go your own way

And everything will be fine”

-Jason Mraz ft James Morrison, “Details in the Fabric”

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I HAVE A SKIN CONDITION AND I WRITE WORDS ABOUT IT.

I have eczema.

That’s actually not saying very much. The term “eczema” covers a lot of different skin problems that affect more people than you think. What I have, specifically, is a case of Atopic Dermatitis (excuse the medical jargon – you tend to do your own research when things happen to you), which means I could have allergies to any number of triggers. This is often hereditary, showing up in families who’ve suffered from trends like asthma or allergic rhinitis. The four winds of luck, chance, genetic predisposition, and divine appointment graced me with the enthralling privilege of receiving almost all of the above, a delightful goulash of a history of bronchitis, chronic sinusitis, and now, eczema.

Not that I am bitter.

Skin conditions such as mine are typically treated with a banquet of steroid creams, anti-allergenic soaps and salves, and a premium selection of anti-histamines and, when the flare-ups are especially bad, oral corticosteroids and anti-histamine injections. The anti-histamines make me drowsy, which in turn makes me sashay between grumpy, tired, moody, and downright depressed, even as the various steroids straddle my body chemistry and make it its bitch.

If you have not experienced this before, you truly should, for it is a wonderful and thrilling experience far beyond what is within imagination’s ability to anticipate. Anyway.

Hands.

Look at your hands.

Aren’t they wonderful things? They are nimble, and sensitive, fragile all the same. They feel so damnably intently.

Now imagine those same nubile, delicate hands being itchy, all the time. Imagine them scratching each other, straddling each other like desperate teenage lovers in passionate embrace as they fornicate in wild gesticulation. Imagine scratching yourself until you see a sudden gush of blood.

Imagine being glad to see blood, as gleeful as a capitalist discovering an oil well in his backyard, because the sharp pain of a wound is far more bearable than the agony of an itch you cannot get rid of.

Remember to keep scratching that wound. Maybe, just maybe, if you dig down deep enough, you’d catch the fiery-limbed cockroaches that scurry under your skin – because it’s impossible that this itch could be mere electrical signals firing from spastic nerve endings. So catch those little bastards. Keep on scratching, even as your nails become more and more ineffectual as scratching tools because they are so caked with dried blood. Scratch until your nails look like broken tombstones on a cold, dark night.

Nails like that aren’t great for guitar-playing, but that’s just a minor inconvenience.

Imagine wearing long pants to sleep on a hot Saturday night to protect yourself from your hands. Imagine waking up to a life where the first thing you do in the morning is to check whether you have stained the bed with blood yet again - a veritable stigmatic without religious euphoria as company, a prepubescent girl on the cusp of womanhood.

Imagine living a life where every single time you bathe could be likened to a purgatorial baptism of fire as unforgiving water meets ravaged skin.

Imagine my frustration, no, the impotent fury, when you discover that all of these things could so easily have been avoided.

I am allergic to the cat.

I say ‘the cat,’ instead of ‘my cat,’ in an effort to disassociate myself with it before it is given away. There are six different categories to describe the severity of how allergic you are to cats, on a scale that runs from 1 to 100. My readings, when I finally took a blood test, were literally off the charts, above 100, testing positive against allergies to cat epithelium.

Epithelium is a very basic type of body tissue, which basically means I am allergic to practically everything put out by the cat (saliva, urine, fur, etc) except maybe its breath. This also means that trying to bathe it to reduce its allergenic output is about as effective as throwing a glass of cold water at a forest fire, though I thank you for your trying to make it better for me.

But here’s the awful truth. The cat has got to go, the sooner the better, and that’s the only way this has to work out. I am held captive in my own room in my own house. I am sick of looking like this at an age and a working context where aesthetics hold primary value. I’d like to think I’m more important than the cat.

Nobody should have to live like this.

Not if they could so easily help it.

 

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Presence

In about an hour’s time I’ll be leaving for the airport, and a couple of hours after that, I’ll be on a plane flying towards Manchester on a roadtrip north towards Scotland.

I wanted to say this very matter-of-factly, because with Facebook and Twitter and all these various social media forms you tend to want to make everything more epic than it really is for meaningless digital affirmation.

So yeah, that’s where i will be going, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter at all where you go, because places are just places, and the world is just a collection of places. What matters is how you receive what you’ve been given. 

What I really want to say is, keep your eyes open. Keep your heart open.

It doesn’t matter where you are. 

Be here.

Be present.

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