Pop the top on my brain box and take a frickin’ gander. Behold! See there before you a golden pedestal—very expensive—and upon that golden pedestal, a dazzling picture. It ripples with pure ecstasy at the prospect of being seen by you. Not just in here, inside this glorious box of grey matter, but outside of the confines of this skull.
I would like to make that happen. I am the one. I have made it my mission, my quest, my raison d'être, to bring this picture to life in the real, wide, currently populated, living breathing world. It is my wish that it exist so people can admire and ogle it and ohh and ahh and finger-gun their approval at me. And maybe one glorious day throw tomato soup at it.
It is a simple dream. I am a simple person.
Tools at the ready, heart full and bursting, I steady my hand and begin to sketch.
In my brain, the vision of the picture is so clear. HD. 4K. Sharp. I see it in my head as though it is right here in front of me, my trembling hands shaking from the perfection of it. In my head, the shape of it is so well defined, and the outline so stark and bold. The colors—vibrant, authentic, true—are so sublime I have no doubt that paint manufacturers will be scrambling over each other to cash in, giving these colors names like Lickable Limoncello, Palpitating Chartreuse, and Come At Me Blue.
And yet…wait a minute. What in the oversized ugliness is this? Oh, horrid creature emerging from thine pencil, what foul evil hast hoiked your skin upon my beach to scare away any selfie-sticked tourists? Are all the beasts in your family so wretched and disheveled with a stank so rank it could disgust a cockroach? Is the pit you live in made from pure shit or just hybridized dookies?
(You get the picture. This is not what I ordered. My wonderful vision has shit the bed.)
False advertising. This is not what was depicted in the brain brochure. I would never have ordered this. Waiter, come to me, please! Erm, what happened to the vision? What caused this disconnect between the image that so proudly flexed in my brain and this…this abomination before me? Crude and rudimentary, it is a disappointment in every way. See me here? I am a sad, half-deflated balloon loitering in the corner of a community hall, lamenting my failure.
Waiter: “Did you really want me to come over here? Seems like you’ve got this self-loathing handled.”
Listen. I’ve written before about the difference between vision and execution and not getting what you ordered from the menu. But this is different. This is pure skill deficiency. This is a complete lack of the ability to take the raw data from my brain—which has built that vision in there, pixel by pixel—and beam it out (Scotty) from inside me to outside me and have it look the same.
Fail.
But that’s not even what gets me. What gets me is that when I write, it’s a completely different experience. It can yield the same shit result, sure, but that’s not the point here.
When I write, I see nothing.
When I write, I don’t know what I’m going to get until it’s out and looking back at me.
That’s not to say there is no vision—I’m not that lamb-lost—it’s just that my brain doesn’t have the blueprints. And it might NEVER have the blueprints. There are other issues (it can’t find a contractor, the laborers have gone on strike, and good luck getting the concrete guy on the phone), but the biggest issue is the complete lack of blueprints. They don’t exist. Nothing is approved before it appears. I have nothing to submit to the planning commission.
Words are a jumble. They exist in the dark space of my brain box, mouthing silent hellos to each other as they drift about as tiny verbose asteroids. With a bump into the skull wall here and a PONG sound as they bounce their way to the other side there, they collide and mingle with each other as awkward guests at a work party. There is nothing 4K about them. They are no perfect vision, no fully-formed picture. Some of them try to bond within the confines of my brain in an attempt to form a union and perhaps get noticed. They float by like a sign flailing behind a small aircraft above Capitola Beach. You can sort of make out the message, but you’ve really got to squint.
I feel them in there. Words, yabbering away, trying to get noticed so that I will set them free. I do everything I can to avoid putting fingers to keys or pen to paper. I don’t want to meet any of them because I don’t know what they want. What are their motives? What’s their AGENDA?! Will they pass inspection? Isn’t it illegal to build without blueprints?
The asteroid field keeps on growing. The word jumble starts squeezing and bulging out of my brain and giving me headaches. I can’t see what this thing will look like at all and I don’t trust what I cannot see. I want to scream at them: “What are your plans!?” Unlike the vision of the picture above that I yearned for everyone to see, I 100% don’t want anyone to see what comes out with this. Judged before they arrive, judged after. What hope do they have?
But they must come out, vision or not. Like burps, these words in my head are better out than in.
Are fingers conduits? Lasers? Shooting cryptic messages from the void to be decoded only when made physical (or digital)? Writing is just touching keys or watching ink emerge from the end of a pen. The image does not come into focus until a certain number of words, set in a particular order, assemble, disassemble, and reassemble. They fall into line, one behind the other, punctuating here and there and self-policing. Here. And there. They push a bad asteroid from the line and it spins away into deletion, grateful to be free. And eventually, there, the vision begins to emerge. The more the words reshuffle, the clearer it becomes. From nothing to something—the story of creation.
It’s not magic. It’s work. And I guess I’m just fascinated with how an image that I want to draw exists forever in perfection only on the inside of my brain—I can’t make it live outside—while what I write has no chance of being anything until it emerges and shows me who or what it is.
When I draw, I try. I try really hard. I want an exact carbon copy of what’s in my head so you can see how miraculous it is. When I write, I try NOT to try and see what happens. Buddhist, I know, but let’s not put airs on it. Basically, just open up the brain box and have a bit of a rumble. Ah, these words have finally got themselves in order. The jumble has yielded an image.
I’m calling it “Rumble in the Jumble.” It’s the only fight I ever want to be in.
Oh, and one more thing: A bus can only be a bus, but a person can be anything. That is a key tenet of Buddhism, right? I might be misremembering that. My brain really has issues.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Via Boing Boing
On Rotation: ‘The Big Ship” by Brian Eno
Via Pitchfork
This is incredibly well done.
Via A List of Beautiful Things
Via The Futurist
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?