This Is What 5:12 AM Is For

Surely the hours from two through six in the morning were made available to us for writing.

I am wondering what good it does, as I closed the last entry. I suspect the provocation would be missed entirely, mostly due to its nature not really being general as such but rather more targeted towards provoking myself or someone like me.
There’s a fair degree of truth in that, that we want mirrors, clones, icons of our selves, after all, it’s we who know us best and yet we still love ourselves.
I certainly hope we do.
I certainly hope you do or you really are in the wrong diary.

One of my problems is my conceited arrogance and my arrogant conceit. While I won’t directly contravene the observation and acknowledgement that I am often obsessed with rightness, at the same time I won’t suppress the fact that I am often quite open to be corrected. My problem is I seem to carry it the other way, that I’m convinced of what I say and my passion will overrule reason or a well posed alternative frame. That’s not true, not even when I myself disagree with what seems to be contempt. The problem is it’s often contempt. So if I haven’t yet again actually failed at exercising tact, it’s just a form of communication much coloured by enthusiasm. I have a lot of enthusiasm at times. A lot.

That I think is what we want, or perhaps I what I want. I want someone as swift, agile and tireless and I want them to perceive many similar things… and then I want them to directly challenge them and then drown me in a flood of their own framing and perception – actually, that would be quite nice for a change.
I do this thing where I want to know about a person’s life at the times they were consuming art that was then at the time or would later become important and meaningful to them. I want to know what job they had or what they were studying, what relationships they had, where they were hanging out. I want to see the pictures they took.

Pictures.

My semi-clever thing for the week was something I captioned a colour palate image on Instagram with:

Some posting what they have.
Others posting what they have seen.
Others still posting how they have seen.

Naturally I left out what they have done but I wanted to juxtapose possession with perception with a greater emphasis on perception over mere sight or recording/documentation (as per base memory-write algorithms).
…how they have seen is a phrase I’m particularly fond of. I once asked someone close to me how they thought and it’s a more complex question than would appear at first digestion. My memories, scattered as they are at times, seem to contain a piece of text I perhaps wrote in the last seven days mentioning the diminished importance of seeing the same thing and instead understanding how it is seen and what is created as a result.

Often we’re looking at the same thing, you and I – right now we are, are we not? Here I am tapping out these words and here you are reading them – this is how we time-travel because I am framing this from the perspective of the reader as I write and so in this moment, we are united. Looking at the same thing. But this example is a perfect one to illustrate that it’s not about what we see, it’s about how we process and interpret. I have clear(ish) objectives in mind and I delineate them thus, however you only receive the end result (I don’t want to overuse that whole ‘understanding comics’ thing but it’s a pretty handy illustration to be honest… pun not intended) and none of the iteration or experience that preceded it.

This is where you will be like me (I’m silently chuckling at job adverts that state ‘You will be…’ my god, what contortions of language and framing) – instead of wondering you’ll guess. You’ll guess more than once. What exactly were you thinking that morning at half-five after having spent the evening at Rok’s? What have I learnt from the seven or so previous entries in this diary that help me build a frame similar to yours? What do I know of you from our shared experiences? What photographs were you taking at the time and how were you perceiving your experience, your world and your life?

Yes. Yes indeed. It’s extremely narcissistic, isn’t it? Isn’t it just the most delicious thing? I obsess over people because I expect them to obsess over me. I devour everything I receive from them, I pursue more and when it runs out I project theories and assumptions in order to create an input/output generation feedback loop and I expect no less from you.
I wasn’t kidding when I said I was a narcissist. A narcissistic, postmodern, minimalist nihilist. Fun with words. Bullshit is a fun word. So is wanker.

For a moment I pondered creating a tag ‘insomnia’ but that would almost certainly be redundant.

Of-course I’m self-centered, of-course I’m self-obsessed. Being obsessed with myself allows me to examine one of the most interesting things I have available to me. The good thing about me and at the same time how conceited I am, is that even if I’m not as open to receiving you as I think I am, because I carry it that way I have no choice but to open myself to you even if I realise it’s a challenge and I definitely will, no matter how uncomfortable it may make me.

I’m going to ellipse past two, probably three entire ideologies/theories/assumptions and land at the bit where I suspect we’ve all become too accustomed to scripting and by that I mean art scripting. I just had a nice conversation with Rok regarding the horrendously prescriptive nature of text and I’ll add to it by saying that all art is created with intent and even when we don’t perceive what that is, we can still see the pragmatic nature with which the art has been created. This is fairly inorganic, and that is a natural facet of art – that we create it, that by virtue of its end creation, even if we didn’t think we had a clear intent in the beginning, that we are creating art is a prime intent itself already. Creating art isn’t a dynamic, free-form and emergent conversation with someone immediately before us including an infinite number of random permutations. Creating art is a linear process and after digesting a whole lot of it, I suspect we all try our hand at the business of prediction.

That’s what we do, don’t we? We have a need, a compulsion, we iterate a few scripts as to how it will play out and then all of a sudden the situation is upon us and we no longer have the security of containment within our own thought space. Now there’s a whole other person right there in front of us and the sheer number of random possibilities is overwhelming and daunting.

I’m repeating myself but I don’t mind it at all.
It’s at that moment that you need to dive into it. Not step off, not tentatively set a toe forward to test the temperature, you jump in, clothes and all and with your carefully scripted roadmap in your hand so that when you strike the surface of the water, the ink is immediately washed away and now you’re swimming – improvising – actually interacting rather than executing a script.

That’s why it’s important to always talk to people. About anything. Shit. So I realise it’s extremely simple but it’s why I talk to everyone about almost anything (almost), and I have suspicions as to the same being the case in my brother and possibly even our father. We must do it, we are compelled to, otherwise all we have are unexecuted scripts, fears and little else.

Tangential interruption: two, perhaps three pieces ago I said something like ‘I must begin with something mundane’ and I’m not sure if I went on to mention it was a deterrent for readers, all this dull talk of keyboards. I still have this habit of setting the barrier to entry unreasonably high. I still like it though. It’s also very much my nature to in some way or another, indirectly or directly to issue a challenge/provocation/invitation straight up because really, challenges and provocations are both invitations.

I have more to say but miraculously, at ten to six in the morning, I feel slightly tired so I’m going to bed.

See you next life.