Dear All,
It’s happened since early teens I guess. From time to time you’ll find me gone. Those times are all to frequent (to me) when they happen and invisible to (my) memory when they don’t. Here it is. I pixelate. I wake one morning, as I did the other day, and find myself to be millions and millions of separated small digital squares. Each one a piece of me. My thoughts about this condition are even more pixelated. When it happened first in my mid teens it was terrifying.
When it happens I feel myself disappear. People will say I’m busy but nothing is as time consuming as giving attention to each pixel of ones self, trying to draw them together for each movement, each thought… Because if I’m not to give each one attention then I fear I won’t function as a whole, to move to speak, to feel. This amount of concentration is distracting for friends – what is he on – and so I think best to stay away and drag my millions of pixels around in what is effectively a swirl of discontent. I guess what I am saying is that this is why I’ve hidden. I hope you can understand but I understand if you don’t.
Yes I understand! All too well. You articulate what many feel. Like Kate Tempest says “We’re all energy”! And often out very selves can seem beyond grasp, it is deeply unsettling. Not to mention the fact of trying to live in a world that contrives to have people believe they are mere economic units, how unreal is that?
Sometimes we become like ether. It doesn’t matter what we own, what we’ve achieved, or how loved we are, in that pixelated state all is experienced as flux, we cannot catch a hold, but are cut adrift, almost intangible, as though all points of reference were flung far out into the galaxy, our very being scattered accross a distance too vast to traverse and no bearings to be found.
Artists perhaps experience this condition a great deal as they are more involved in the being part of being human, that innate need to sense things out, to search, to reveal and create, find a language for that which is hidden, the voice they cannot quiet, like a child with endless questions “Why?!”.
Personal loss or truamas may be a drive behind this overriding need to search and to create but nonetheless a certain dislocation is a necessary aspect of this relentless feeling out, intuiting desire to travel beyond the rational, into an unknowing and at times “lost” state of immersion. For in order to find what is hidden one has to first be prepared to get lost, to acknowledge a lack of control and to enter into the universal where questions are born and energy is freed up to ride through the individual, as it does so very powerfully and distincitvely when you “perform” Lemn, or when Kate takes to the stage, and others.
The craft and hard graft that makes that possible is a large part of the beauty of creating, without it inspirations and questions would remain unrealised or half formed. To be immersed in creating makes the ether abate! The lostness and disarray is through hard work eventually shed like dead skins and the deadending wieght of homogenisation falls away, a lie exposed, universal truths sound out through individual voices and become voices in the wilderness. There is no other Kate Tempest, Kei Miller, Gil Scot Heron, Jean Binta Breeze, Merle Collins, Lemn Sissay….
The questions asked and realities exposed, the spaces opened up and possibilites made real, all the mulitfariousness of being, given sharp and brilliant context, the struggle and the rich celebration of being, all touched upon and realised in forms disecernable, shared, so that this sense of disappearing of being formlessness is thus turned inside out, and we are made real again, individually and collectively we are found.
Rhiannon, this is absolutely beautful. Thankyou
Fragmentation is a tricky thing.
Fortunately, the screen –ie, the self– is always there.
After the storm of pixellation, let us salute the HD of calm.
Un abrazo,
Esther.
I loved this…. Felt so often and more so witnessed so often in someone very close to my heart. Sometimes the need to become invisible at this time is overwhelming. What an amazing piece of writing.