Synchronicity, star charts, cycles, and storytelling

Picture it: A Canadian medical soap opera - of the primetime-but-like-Tuesday-night variety (better writing than a daytime soap, but still plenty over the top). It brought some real feels, and equal measure catastrophe and spice, with a sci-fi/spirituality twist: the main character saw dead people. Or nearly dead people.

*Soft sci-fi medical soap, Saving Hope. Available on HULU.*

Anyway, nuggets can be gained from all types of sources, and this show was no exception. Along with this gem of a ranchera, a Mexican cowboy love tragedy tune featured in one episode, Vamonos by Jose Alfredo Jimenez, I also noted this:

"You know what tolstoy says, There are only two kinds of stories, A man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town." I love a paraphrased idea.

Cycles and Stories

I've been thinking about cycles lately, about piecing things together to make a history, a life, to make sense, to myself, others, how we build things collectively to be understood, to feel grounded and to look forward.

I made a print this week about a little experience with star charts I had last year.

Monotype printed and painted on an old pillowcase.

It reads, "Somebody told me my star chart showed I was living the same life over and over again - all arrows pointing in one direction. E says 'my friend would say that you are reliving a path again and again, hoping to make it right." It’s printed on an old pillow I couldn’t make myself throw away. It supported me while I slept for years, years longer than it should have, and I get attached to things that have history, even sometimes the dingy things.

The stories we construct to make sense of our experiences, to feel in control and legible, to feel progression - they can propel us forward, or they can suck all the aliveness out of life. We call it ancestry, we call it identity, we call it trauma, astrology, or childhood, depression, we call it hope or god.

To capture a story from a random jumble of happenings and circumstances, to see connections and patterns, to pick out the parts that make us feel there is something to really live for - this process of meaning-making is, I’m guessing, what art was meant to do. That process of reading, of Making, of wanting to connect, is what I'm interested in at the moment, a process so individual, and also guided by culture (the Big stories), it is so fascinating to me. The relationship between things and the process of placing them in relation.

One + One = Three (Stories)

I don't remember who said this, or where I read it, but I think it was a structuralist thinking about language and metaphor. How a thing, an association and a story play off one another; the world of objects as language, things populating, creating, and enriching.

A few years ago, I had a studio wall where I posted scribbles, ideas, sketches and photos of things I was thinking about in my art practice. Seen together, small ideas gained meaning from the things around them. It grew, morphed and then breathed its own life as a collection. Like a quote from Gabriel Orozco,“Borges wrote somewhere that all these things that are next to each other, we call the universe. It’s the being next to each other that appeals to me." Even the quote itself, paraphrased and interpreted, captures and affects or alters the idea of another, and through that,

attracts more ideas, magnetizing them, combining to create a new organism,

a new meaning, one of circumstance and connection and multiplication -

what you could call synchronicity, or

the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection -

This work, this mass, this collection of fragments, particles, objects regarded as forming one body

This is the way my brain works.

The telling

I've always enjoyed the simplest mechanisms. A music box without the box. A button on a spring. Those toys in dentist's offices where kids move wooden bobs around wires. A single voice singing a folk song. The mechanism is simple, exposed, unassuming. The magic that results is also those things and more, a moment of expression like a hundred thousand others and also totally singular and beautiful.

I've been thinking about this lately, about the why. Asking the same questions, coming up with different answers. For the record, I don't know anything about astrology, but that's not important to me.

Putting two and two together, like the saying goes.

To see what it means.

My star chart pointed in one direction, again and again. I have been looking for something, but I hadn’t quite found it. Maybe this time.

Can one realization change the trajectory of a life? Can we learn and unlearn enough to realize Lifetimes of searching?

Will we get it right one day? Or do we just keep telling the same stories, over and over, and living the same result?

Will I keep asking the same questions, in different ways? Tune in next week (or whenever I make another blog post)

Vamonos by Jose Alfredo Jimenez

Que no somos iguales, dice la gente

We aren’t the same, people say

Que tu vida y mi vida se van a perder

That your life and mine will be lost

Que yo soy un canalla y que tú eres decente

That I am a scoundrel, and you are decent

Que dos seres distintos no se pueden querer

That we are too different, we can’t care for each other

…. Yo no entiendo esas cosas de las clases sociales

I don’t understand those things of the social classes

Sólo sé que me quieres y que te quiero yo

I only know that you love me and that I love you

….Vámonos, donde nadie nos juzgue

Let’s go, where no one will judge us

Donde nadie nos diga que hacemos mal

Where no one will tell us what we do is wrong

Vámonos alejados del mundo…

Let’s go, far from the world

Excuse the super literal translation - I made it myself!

I'm not sure what this is space is meant to be: diaristic, journalistic, interrogative, totally whimsical, word vomit. If any of these thoughts resonated, or you'd like to add to any of them, let me know.

More about stories another time…
-Tikva

Dopamine, the layering of imagery, and meeting yourself

What’s Prints? And thoughts connected to them