"Hello, You Have Reached the Plug and Play Connection Hotline"
How do we achieve the perfection of one-to-one engagement - with our works and our lives?
Plugs looking for sockets. That’s all we are—a configuration of prongs and casing yearning for connection. It is our primal desire to find that perfect receptacle for our love, our brain, our heat. Are you my one true switch? The one to electrify my being? To wake me from my deadened state of inert existence with that high-voltage shock and soul?
With our cords as curious tentacles tasting air of opinion and acceptance, we add feet and inches to our length, splicing, stretching, and exploring. We seek the color, the taste, and the satisfying ZAP! of it as it pulses in our blood. Shivering and vibrating, thrumming and chanting, we surge toward the abyss.
Electrify my core. Complete my circuit. Overload my grid.
Speak nothing to me of grounding.
Wall sockets, power strips, portable power stations? 12V, 120V, 230V? What will be the best outlet for your work?
We flail about in galleries and bookstores and at the listening walls of our youth, examining pin configurations and wondering if this is where we’ll fit. Do I like that? Who am I? Who will I be? Tell me! Tell me my watts and amps and hertz and giga-majoules and I will openly, willingly, and truthfully bare my naked circuitry to you.
I am a toaster filled with bread seeking a viable socket to brown me up for butter. Trust me—I have adapters and am global. Positive or negative, I will go with your flow.
Connection. Connection is purposeful, eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul engagement. A snap-to-attention salute of full focus and intense fascination for a brief and sublimely intimate moment. Connection can ignite a spark of love, hate, or simple indifference—all reactions are valid—but the connection must be made for the circuit to complete. No connection, no charge. It’s that simple.
Bigger than love and wider than hurt, connection is pure hands-up submission to the moment—the nuclear fusion of attention and trust.
And you’ll know it when you feel it.
People are easy—so many flashing lights on the display panel to give it away. The eyes have it (sometimes) but the body always does. Eyes and ears and flushing flesh plugging into the portals of your work. Ding! Ding! Ding!
When it’s a fake or incomplete connection, you’ll know that too. The power will be weak and the flow, intermittent and barely trickling. With eyes dimmed and heads swiveling elsewhere, their body will reject your implanted heart to break the circuit leaving you fried and empty. The thud of your dud plug—that’s all, that’s it.
It is a failure to engage. The DOA of your DNA in an AC/DC world.
The search continues.
You can feel the engagement in the physical, of course: the hug plug, if you will. With arms outstretched and warmth radiating, we engage through the chests of our favorite knitwear. We are pure “knit one purl one” transducers, stretched on an idea exchange loom to feel the pulse of each other through our yarns. I feel you, you feel me. Chest to, arm to, pelvis to.
With my cheek against your ear, I can feel the roar of the sea of you—an ocean with waves strong enough to power my whole earth.
Can the work we create get that hug plug feeling, too? Hmm…
The heart of our art flails frantic as a hose with faucet wide open, or a cobra stretching from its basket to seek the melody, the switch, the full nuke flow. Any twisty ol’ metaphor will do. Just know the hug of our slippery and difficult art is possible. Right place, right time, right woolly jumper. The embrace will be cerebral and infinitely obtuse as we hold for the thought, the sound, and the vaguest hint of vocal fry. This connection must be unearthed to function.
How?
You’re asking me?
Personally, I wear a FREE HUGS sign.1 I stand in the street and wait for the bolt—from you or from me to you. I write and my writing charges its static through the atmosphere looking for the socket. Your socket. And if I do it right, and I let my storm build into the humid afternoon, it will hit you in the chest like lightning and off your feet you'll go. The air will eject from you as the weight of my charge will strike at your bullseye. Or it won’t.
To look at art, they say, it helps to stand in the center of it. Then step forward, note the texture, the brush strokes, and how it moves your eye to different parts of it. Step back next and observe the big picture happenings, and how it looks from different angles. Finally, they say, consider the subject and how you feel about it.
Or to put it in my words: Plug in. Flick the Switch. Jiggle the cable.
People and art—we are wired the same way.
I stand in the center before you, just a writer, looking to both give and receive super-charged hugs. Supply my current so that I may draw all the juice from this, my life.
Or to put it crudely:
Turn me on.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won’t let you do it. You’ve got to say, “Well, to hell with you.” And the cat says, “Wait a minute. He’s not behaving the way most humans do.” Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: “Well, what’s wrong with you that you don’t love me?” Well, that’s what an idea is. See? You just say, “Well, hell, I don’t need depression. I don’t need worry. I don’t need to push.” The ideas will follow me. When they’re off-guard, and ready to be born, I’ll turn around and grab them.“
― Ray Bradbury, from “Zen in The Art of Writing”
On Rotation: "Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)” by The Buzzcocks
“Weird Al” Yankovic breaks down his most iconic tracks.
My favorite Weird Al song is still White and Nerdy. I don’t know why.
Via Open Culture
It’s a tiny town. For Guinea pigs!
Via Boing Boing
The word FREE isn’t always literal—it just means willingly given. Some hugs are transactional. Art can be and is often a viable business.