We are unimaginably affected by the places we inhabit. Well, at least for the few (or many) moments before you notice and laugh it off, or just fail to notice and wander off regardless. The important question is, how do we make the most of those precious minutes before they evaporate?
Addendum
I’m trying to overcome a writers block. No, that’s wrong! A creators block, that’s pathetic! In short, I can’t be bothered to share stuff because… I’m too busy writing shit for my own entertainment. Yes, that’s it.
I’ve posted this because I’m going to have to react (my PDA will wake up the OCD Goblin) to explain why I did this and type more stuff. Oh shit, I’m using my own psychological profiling against me.
Who the hell let the Homunculus out!
Fish
When you’re in the middle of it, so to speak, doing your thing in the place where your thing is done, you generally don’t give much thought to the place. Like thousands of years of old Ethiopian proverb translations confirm: fish discover water last. But axioms aside, when you’re on your pitch, doing your thing, are you really that aware of the pitch or are you focussing on the thing that you’re doing (or selling in popular pitch terms)?
I was once in a bird sanctuary in London in awe of a (soon to be) venerable old goat waxing lyrical about his thing, and drawing lovely shapes on paper with a marker. I know, how long ago was that sort of analogue shit happening! Anyway I remember asking naively “but what’s it sat on” the thing you’re drawing is on something, what is that? He got confused then annoyed and said paper, which is a perfectly reasonable answer. But he was waxing lyrical in terms of poetry and models and metaphors rather than tangible pens and papers, so the question was valid. In attempting to ‘draw’ a model, a window through which to explain, or make sense of a landscape, the landscape you’re trying to make sense of, first, has to exist or you’re in mortal danger of panaceaphilia!
Surely, I thought and then I got my arse in my hand for the next couple of days! Afterwards, I took a long train home (scribbling away in a shiny black notebook they’d handed out) and then literally and physically ran to see my mentor. She was a bottle in, and told me to calm down and fuck off.
I had noticed the white paper being drawn on, in the model. My homunculus pointed out that it’s not drawn in suspension of physics, in the ether, it’s on something that the white paper also represents. I later worked out that the other side of the equals sign to the model was navigation! Amazing I thought, until a few moments later I realised that the boring result was actually: options. I left it there for months, slightly disappointed.
Just like finally getting your long awaited first ever Goldfish, in a crappy bowl!
Fucking Maps
If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask. Surely I don’t need to put that into a quotation?
But many years before the quote, I was there and unable to articulate it so perfectly (albeit the sentiment is old and Greek as are still, many of cleverest articulations).
One of the things the cleverest people do – always and without exception – is to fail to take themselves sufficiently into account. There’s a way of saying that, which would make me equally memorable, but it’s not here yet, unfortunately, so the fish thing will have to do.
Dave was dancing in his favourite pyjamas, fully unaware of the pyjamas that most people were afraid to mention. Getting my arse in my hand was the wrong tactic to deploy and a few weeks later, while doing something innocuous, the Homunculus said, “real things interpreted into anything two dimensional are just an approximation, to orient something impossible to imagine, in such a way, as to make it seem tangible, viewable from one place, but only for those who know how to read the approximation typically, an appropriately scaled diagram”.
No she didn’t, she said “fucking maps”!
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