interest becomes lens

Untitled Donut, sculpture and photo by Tikva Lantigua, 2018.

(A followup in the Going Home series)

Interest becomes lens.

Some things come around when you need them, like the body craving crunch, vitamins, or movement. Circling back to something I loved, finding myself changed, finding it old and new and still holding my fascination, seeing why, seeing what I can leave behind; that's worth time.

lens: something that facilitates and influences perception, comprehension, or evaluation.

also a lens: a highly transparent, nearly spherical body in the eye that focuses light rays (as upon the retina).

It starts with a feeling like falling for someone - but it gives more. More because your connection isn't dependent on ‘the other’ finding you like-able, entertaining, or even understandable. It doesn't change in reaction to you, it isn't selective. It doesn't take; not your energy, only your attention. It gives you your energy back.

Paying attention to my attention

Obsessive focus, circumscribed interests, restrictive - It’s been six months since a medical professional said something along the words of ‘yup, you are definitely autistic (and also adhd),’ and almost a year and a half since I first got an inkling of what that means and how deeply it would explain and temper this feeling that I was only barely passing as an ordinary human. So, naturally I’ve spent the last 1.5 years learning as much as I can, which includes how intense focus (and sometimes fleeting, as it is with adhd) shows up in my life, work, and artwork, and how relatable that is when you take ‘autistic’ outside a medical text.

Now, the more I read about Autistic joy from a medical perspective, the more icky, pathologized terms crop up, like circumscribed, restrictive, special; and its from here I’d like to open up and extend this wandering analysis to any intense relationship with a subject which a creative person can wield to their advantage.

Looking back to figure out a way forward

The wholeness of ideas can be found in

details

picked out of everyday

stuff.

Going in circles

I think artists of all types have questions, interests, that they circle their whole lives. Sometimes specific (where does communication breakdown?) sometimes diffuse (what is it to be known), or object-based (repeat patterns).

These “circumscribed” interests, currently making up a chunk of the diagnostic criteria for Autism under the latest Diagnostic Manual (DSM-V), which sometimes last a long time, sometimes are serial in nature, which hold lots of our attention, which might seem random or tedious to others, or not - these loosely defined kinds of passions have one thing in common: they seem uncommon. And they are kind of a given when talking about a creative practice. How else would we make it through the precarious life of artist? Without that passion, I wouldn’t have started half of the projects I’ve completed, some of them taking almost every waking hour for weeks (gotta use that hyperfocus, thanks grad school). I mean, making a book with as many pages as I had lived (a bit of over 8,000 at the time) would have sucked the remaining life out of me otherwise.

Some of my questions/interests include

Language, Failures of language, Communication, What makes identity, Friendships, Meaning making, Big feelings, Motivations, House, Surreality, and magical realism in storytelling, Scifi, Publishing and printed ephemera, Being known, screen printing, relationships between characters, or the way just about anything with texture can hold ink and create meaning on a page.

These subjects gain meaning from things around them,

and give meaning to the things around them.

Interest becomes metaphor.

a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.

Here’s to noticing

I get this feeling when I find a new interest; the feeling is like fluttery and tingly, and it invites and insinuates itself into different scenarios throughout my day, in my thinking. Encountering strangers, certain relationship parallels with the people in my life, trying to understand motivations, or even just the way a material behaves in a certain technique - these experiences become suffused with “extra”, with more, with weight or depth because I begin connecting them to my super-involving interests.

Interest becomes homology. Or is it analogy?

the state of having the same or similar relation, relative position, or structure.

a comparison between two things, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

a correspondence or partial similarity.

a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects.
"works of art were seen as an analogy for works of nature"

a process of arguing from similarity in known respects to similarity in other respects.

The interest becomes a template, where information can be input, compared and contrasted, re-interpreted and understood in a new way; a gestalt processing, a top down understanding, a copy-paste of structure to understand mechanics of things. I can understand events and people through them, I can understand and express myself better through them, rapidly expanding connections and reflections.

When I was a kid, I was really into M*A*S*H. I first saw it in eighth grade, my father was deployed in Iraq. Though this tv show was over thirty years old by the time I found it, it served as a bridge connecting me with big ideas and big feels during some stressful formative years. If you’ve never seen it (or just vaguely heard of it??), M*A*S*H followed an ensemble cast of doctors at a field hospital through eleven seasons of the Korean War, during a time when the Vietnam War was still dragging on (and the show lasted years longer than the Korean Conflict, ironically).

You’ve probably heard the catchy opening tune.

They handled heavy subjects like war, violence, hypocrisy, injustice, along with compassionate takes on friendship, longing, making the best of things, belonging, with plenty of wordplay and absurd humor. It was and still is very special to me and helped me to process tough stuff, and laugh, too. I’ve watched all eleven seasons at least 5 times at different points in my life — it shows up when I could use it, it keeps me company, and I learn new things about myself every time it visits.

House was something else I loved as a young teen. It was important to me in ways I hadn't nailed down, and seeing it for what it is now, with my new eyes, with new knowledge of myself allows a special kind of self-reflection, while opening up a network of adjoining interests to tumble into. This is the show that helped inspire this writing series, just when I needed it.

Often just a matter of perspective.

Circumscribed interests. Restrictive. Obsessive. Special. Sustained. Not forever, but for a while. Maybe even a call and return.

Over months, or years.

Restrictive interests, in the creative world, mean drive - a matter of priority and perspective. Restrictive means NO to a lot of things that you “should” care about, but it also means making more time for the things you like. It implies a boundary, and a YES to that thing that you wanna do and think about. We need that when the print goes sour, the animation is a drag, the writing doesn’t makes sense: it propels us forward to that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine or serotonin or whatever feel-good juice gets released in our brains when we finish a thing, and we see ourselves embodied by what we’ve just brought into the world.

We’re in this difficult moment where people seem to be really scared of emotion. How many times a day do I hear someone saying something is “cringe” when what they seem to mean is that there was a real attempt at expressing something meaningful? Everyone’s so scared of feeling anything. And I sort of understand why; we’ve all been through a lot, but I know that I need these kinds of books. I need to feel, and I need to feel it all. And I need to understand why I’m feeling it all. Living through the process.

- Lindsay Lerman, Interview with the Creative Independent

There can be a lot of shame around interests which are also passions — whether its what kind of interest and how people look at it as being nerdy, cringe, or boring, or whether its the kind of passion and how much you care — being excited about something, at worst, can paradoxically incite people to anger and ridicule. At mediocre middle, tepid reactions can be interpreted as judgment for somebody accustomed to being misunderstood or brushed off. This is an especially common experience for autistic folks, diagnosed or not, and otherwise passionate people, who often have unusual interests and lots of strong feelings that the majority of folks don’t share. I mean, Sci-Fi fandom is a primo example.

What makes an interest “special”? Or “Focused”? How much do you have to like, and in what way do you have to like something, in order to afford it significance and A Place In Your Life? And when do you or others suddenly define it as a negative? Is ‘special’ derogatory? Some think so. Does ‘focused’ not quite cover it? Whatever the framing, claim those things you love, find fascinating, get a kick out of over and over again and allow them to continue informing your world. That’s what I keep telling myself to do, anyway.

This space, this blog/writing space, this series of writings on special interests and how I connect with them, and this art practice in general, it’s a response, a pushback, to that feeling to withhold and protect. Because always withholding means to live unknown.

And I guess that is the real power in looking back and embracing interests with curiosity, wholeheartedly, and being willing to share them with others. 

Here’s to reclaiming joy, autistic or not, and in all the places we might find it.

Your whys, my whys

Some things come around when you need them, like the body craving crunch, vitamins, or movement. Circling back to something I loved, finding myself changed, finding it old and new and still holding my fascination, seeing why, seeing what I can leave behind, that's worth time.

Paying attention to your interests, to the why's, means filling in the blanks of your own context. It builds scaffolds to support more of the things that fill you up, give you life, nourish your soul, or whatever euphemism for finding purpose and contentment you prefer. It also helps to point the way to the kind of living you want to carry forward.

Current goal: Being intentional about turning interests into the things that feed me (metaphorically or fiscally), and sharing these more openly. Like attracts like, right?

Luckily, art is a container that can hold all things - and so is this blog/writing reservoir.

What are some of your why’s? What’s a goal you have for your creative practice, or just generally in life? What beloved thing are you currently revisiting?

I hope you get something from this exercise in finding home, of "looking back looking forward", and maybe next time?