memorypalisades-blog
a sort of diary
saving myself from myself since 1993
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“Lend yourself to others but give yourself to yourself.”
From Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962).
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“Adrenaline Junkie” by Kathryn Ashcroft, contemporary artist, Utah (http://kathyashcroft.weebly.com/current-paintings.html)
Slightly stoned, I followed a friend into a gallery on Saturday amid a flurry of townies and curious rural residents who endeavored to parallel park dirty diesel rigs so that they could participate in the monthly art walk in the downtown corridor. I showed up with a singular, self-serving intention that evening, and that was to go get lost.
In 2014 I took a class called “Coffee & Cigarettes” at the University of Washington, an English lit course that examined various French new wave work like that of Sarte and Camus. Those books taught me about dadaists, and how they practiced art by living artfully, often wondering around town aimlessly, on purpose. This practice of deliberately getting lost is known as “somnambulism.”
I “turned on” as cult-writer Tom Robbins calls it, imbibing on a bit of sativa and deep breaths of brisk autumnal air before joining the downtown calamity. I had plans to meet up with a friend but explained my desire to wander aimlessly, guided only by chance and whimsy. They were down to accompany.
Kathryn Ashcroft’s painting “Adrenaline Junkie” picked me out of a packed gallery, beckoning me closer, to examine its obscure mixture of soft and sharp brush strokes. It demanded that I ardently observe, and so I obeyed like a diligent argonaut does. I first noticed the overall dichotomy of the piece before moving on to the subject, or primary character, or whatever you call the focal piece within a painting. It was a mountain goat, which didn’t mean much to me at the time; then I began to wonder whether the goat or the cliff’s edge was the painting’s primary subject.
The artist was standing in the gallery, appearing comfortably lost in thought as about three dozen individuals sipped wine and gasped out loud at her paintings, a ring-around-the-rosie of grape elated flattery. They didn’t seem to notice that the lapidary who created a wall’s worth of stunning gems was among them, they didn’t care. They didn’t really like fine art, it was mostly an excuse for couples to hire a babysitter, or for older couples to stretch their legs and probably also get as high as I was while holding their partner’s hand and saying things like, “Isn’t this lovely?” And then their partner would concede, “Oh, so lovely.” I decided to introduce myself to the artist, to Kathryn Ashcroft, and tell her which painting picked me.
“That one has only picked about a handful of people,” she responded, as if we both agreed before speaking that that’s what paintings do—pick people. “It’s the only one without a tag, I apologize,” she continued, “I call it my transition piece.”
It felt odd to continue talking to the painting’s creator. “This is what the God of that world sounds like,” I thought to myself. I’m somewhat relieved that that God’s voice was feminine and pleasant.
“Here is the God of this painting, here I am in the middle of this room, here I am in the middle of enormous transition,” I thought to myself.
I’ve dedicated over an hour of every week to deep self-examination for two years now. Some call it “therapy,” but I truly consider it to be more like a hierophantic soul search. Sometimes it’s terribly annoying, most of the time I become suspicious that I’m turning into some sort of self-worshipping egoic freak, but every time I leave feeling a little bit taller. I’m keen to the fact the last ten years of my life have been an exploration of my own edge and what lies at the bottom of it. Through destruction and creation, loss and gain, I’ve hit rock bottom, I’ve tumbled over and over again. Funny, though, it was only until I saw this painting that the falling and the hurt and the pain and the big bad unknown below has only made me into a more polished and more precious gem.
It was about a month ago that I began to feel emboldened by a specific pursuit of precisely what I want. I started speaking out, speaking louder, and asking for things that I want, whether that was information or more batteries or help. Asking for help is sometimes the hardest thing I do in a day. But I’ve been doing that more, telling my truth more, and as a result I feel less afraid of my edge. Lately, I picture my edge as a trust fall. I see each of their faces staring up at me with arms outstretched, each person who has asked me whether or not I’ve yet to hear some “good news” in the past two weeks. They’re encouraging me, saying my name out loud, reminding me that they’ve got my back. They’re empowering me to explore my edge by significantly decreasing the likelihood of peril, danger, or death. “They’ve got my back, they’ve got my back, they’ve got my back” is what I remember telling myself before stepping off a 30-foot boardwalk, backwards, falling perfectly (as instructed) into the arms of two dozen other thirteen year olds at summer camp in Yellowstone National Park. Here I am over ten years later, a resident of Yellowstone County, living a somnambulists daydream wherein every day is kind of like that one day I was encouraged to climb high and “trust fall” 30-feet through the air into the arms of a bunch of newly teen-aged girls, and they caught me, they didn’t let me die.
"Adrenaline Junkie” could very well be a thought piece about the unknown, the stuff that’s out of focus, like our futures and sometimes, if repressed, our pasts. It could also be a statement piece about perception, an invitation to visualize a variety of possibility. The sure-footed, hard headed ungulate depicted in the painting appears to already know, and maybe that’s the point. We all know deep down that to fall and to fail is also to trust that we are strong and smart enough to climb up high in the first place, to make small strides each day toward precisely what we want. That sure-footed adrenaline junkie in the sub-alpine greenery, unafraid, perpetually positing an invitation to either imagine an incredible fall, or imagine turning our backs on the edge so that we may continue to get higher, to turn on, to ascend.
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I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
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Case is a special grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun or pronoun in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in.
Grammatical case pertains to nouns and pronouns. A noun's or a pronoun's case shows its relationship with the other words in a sentence. The main cases you will encounter in English are: The Subjective Case (or Nominative Case) The Possessive Case (or Genitive Case)
de·clen·sion
dəˈklen(t)SH(ə)n/
noun
1.
(in the grammar of Latin, Greek, and other languages) the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its grammatical case, number, and gender are identified.
2.
literary
a condition of decline or moral deterioration.
"the declension of the new generation"
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if you wanna be my lover you gotta be able to rip a log in half with your bare hands
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☾ express your inner Vintage Loser // inspiration ☼
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there's old buildings and pretty leaves. we can eat ramen noodles and talk about our broken hearts.
how my friend persuaded me to visit boston
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important to today
“I don’t own myself more than any canyon owns the river that shaped it.”
“Sexy and slinky and vulnerable and cheap like Venetian blinds that got fucked up from someone pulling them too hard and you are looking at them through a window from the curb. Pleasure suicides. I am a fire you cannot love.”
“In a lot of ways I’ve done what I had to to survive, and I’ve done what I did to know what it felt like to be the version of me that lined up with my understanding, at the time, of the trauma girl. Am I damaged yet? Am I bad?”
“I pour coffee from one pot to another, marrying them. I’ve slipped in and out of my life this way, by pretending, or allowing myself to be complicated.”
-Aiden Arata, “The Tina Turner Club”
-Liz Bowen, “Do You Feel At Home Here?”
“Every piece of his narrative married miracle with tragedy.”
“I was not actively in love with him, only in the gauzy forever way everyone is in love with the first person who truly sees them.”
-Courtney Preiss, “We Think Very Much Of You”
“Here is how a bridge parenthesizes the sky”
“You know what
My desire is a paper
Toilet seat cover in the rest stop bathroom of the world”
“I’m holding onto the idea that one day I might want myself moreOr I already do
But like how the dog wants against the window”
-Aiden Arata, “Fate vs Destiny”
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laptopped:
imagine banana with any other vowel
bununu
benene
bonono
binini
bynyny
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Buffy Season 4 Episode22: karina practices kaballah every character's psyche every day we are working on our perception and psychological routines or whimsies or whatever, in some way, big or small & it's all energetic this episode of Buffy rules I probably misspelled kaballah where's the nearest sugar factory batteries are beeping haha
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