These last few days – warm, sunny, quiet. Just gorgeous. Green and beautiful.
College is on Easter holidays (I think. Days fly by without me noticing and, with each one, I come closer to not achieving the thing I most want to achieve.) Something is very wrong and I'm not sure what it is.
The most immediately worrying wrong thing is that I've lost all confidence in the work I've been doing. It looks shallow, meaningless and without soul. At one time it spoke to me; now it just thumbs its nose and blows a raspberry and the only thing it says is ner ner ne ner ner. While I thought I was gainfully employed I was, it seems, wasting my time.
Now I have to justify what I've been working on for the past year and I can find no justification for it at all.
I have, effectively, thought myself to a standstill.
I've read and read and read. I've read artists' diaries, critical theorists, thinkers. Poetry. Books about chaos, critical mass, emergence, synchronicity. I've dabbled in mental illness, going with the flow, mindfulness. Why artists do what they do (apparently it's all about the conflict between maternal and paternal aesthetics. Resolving the conflict between what's real and what's ideal).
I now know why traffic clumps up on the M25: a nervous driver panics at how fast s/he's going and puts the brakes on. Everybody else – who, until then, has been pootling along at what seems to them like a comfortable speed – is forced to brake, too. They all slow down despite the fact that there's nothing to slow down for. (Except the need not to crash into the car in front.)
I've learned all sorts of other stuff as well. Like that scientists of one sort of another are now using physics and maths and what they know about the behaviour of molecules and atoms and nano-particles (I made that one up, I think) to predict how humans will behave. In a nightclub. When fire breaks out.
When they meet in the street and do that funny dance-thing so's not to bump into each other. Or take turns going through a doorway.
They (the scientists) have come up with computer-based simulations to test their theories because setting fire to a real nightclub is not an option. They invent what they call peoploids (who behave like molecules and atoms and nano-particles) and watch what they do.
I like the idea of peoploids but not the idea that how I behave is as predictable as the behaviour of molecules. Which are, of course, unthinking and at the mercy of whatever happens around them.
