Self aware and self obsessed.
Sat down to type up some Z38.5 nonsense and ended up thinking instead about the reactions I got when I mentioned I gave away books when I had finished with them. Much like the reactions of some people when they see me bending books in half to make them easier to hold - or reading in the bath. I’m just not precious about them, I’m the same with comics and CDs. I don’t treat them as sacred objects and if I know I’m done with something I can’t see any point in hanging on to it: stuff like that is a delivery system rather than a possession.
When I first came to London and was a pauper living hand to mouth finding a good second hand book was a godsend and I always offered a small internal thank you to the soul that had donated it to the charity shop in the first place. I feel I am keeping a tradition alive by returning the favor now I’m able to by my books new.
Looking deeper the compulsion to purge myself of accumulated "stuff" is part of a bigger picture. Our bodies cells continually die off and are replaced so that we are (in an approximate seven year cycle if I remember rightly) made up of entirely different matter than we had previously been. I take that to signify that the continuity of who we are has little or nothing to do with the flesh we inhabit. Or at the very least the fact that we change as individuals is as much to do with that cellular renewal as it is to do with the experiences we have which shape us.
I don’t want to be defined by the things I own, the things I surround myself with. I don’t want to be the way I dress or the way I grow my hair or the job I have. I don’t want to make the mistake of thinking that what i am is based on any solid thing. I am not this thing of skin and I am not the things outside the skin. It’s how I am that makes me who I am - not anything else.
This (perhaps skewed) possession purging is also partly responsible for the "project work" - the way I set myself defined time limits on any artistic/creative/pointless time-wasting endeavor and then abandon it and move on in favor of something new. It would have been very easy to have spent the rest of my life becoming a better illustrator, but it would have quickly got to a point where that would have been all that I was. Changing the rules and moving on means - in part - that I keep learning, and on some small but important level it keeps the part of me that struggles to understand the "who" in "who I am" awake. It’s a trade off - I may never become a better illustrator, but hopefully I will become a better zero.
When I first came to London and was a pauper living hand to mouth finding a good second hand book was a godsend and I always offered a small internal thank you to the soul that had donated it to the charity shop in the first place. I feel I am keeping a tradition alive by returning the favor now I’m able to by my books new.
Looking deeper the compulsion to purge myself of accumulated "stuff" is part of a bigger picture. Our bodies cells continually die off and are replaced so that we are (in an approximate seven year cycle if I remember rightly) made up of entirely different matter than we had previously been. I take that to signify that the continuity of who we are has little or nothing to do with the flesh we inhabit. Or at the very least the fact that we change as individuals is as much to do with that cellular renewal as it is to do with the experiences we have which shape us.
I don’t want to be defined by the things I own, the things I surround myself with. I don’t want to be the way I dress or the way I grow my hair or the job I have. I don’t want to make the mistake of thinking that what i am is based on any solid thing. I am not this thing of skin and I am not the things outside the skin. It’s how I am that makes me who I am - not anything else.
This (perhaps skewed) possession purging is also partly responsible for the "project work" - the way I set myself defined time limits on any artistic/creative/pointless time-wasting endeavor and then abandon it and move on in favor of something new. It would have been very easy to have spent the rest of my life becoming a better illustrator, but it would have quickly got to a point where that would have been all that I was. Changing the rules and moving on means - in part - that I keep learning, and on some small but important level it keeps the part of me that struggles to understand the "who" in "who I am" awake. It’s a trade off - I may never become a better illustrator, but hopefully I will become a better zero.