Bliss_translating_time

Someone passed through me. It happened without warning and lasted three days. They were there and then they were not, a thoughtless presence.

I am expecting people to be very nimble with verbs and tenses I understand only functionally. Future perfect, past perfect, present perfect – my education seems to be very distant.

The things I have not dropped yet I carry forward with me, and I find I keep much of it to myself, but am only recently aware of doing so. It makes it different, like seeing the real set of a television show in domestic lighting.

I look at real estate listings for houses I do not need in places I do not live and have done so for some time.

The first actual writing I consider I did was about the language of real estate for a high school English assignment. I surprised myself that I could write. I even did tangential research at the university library. The teacher did not value what I had done and marked it accordingly as not paying attention to the topic or brief that I cannot now recall. Something to do with static images I think. But I knew I was onto something about architecture and time and aspiration and a sense of enclosure. Or how walls weakly describe a sense of the edges of our being.

A boy who keeps snails as pets wrote in an exercise book about a character who just wants to sleep. He lives with a snail called Simon, as in the game of Simon says. But there is noise being made by others. He only leaves the house when it is something to do with sleep. He says that the thoughts in the character’s head are all secret as he has not met anyone yet.

In a sense, any ‘piece of architecture’ is a biological restatement by the members of the species that built it and shaped it to its users’ needs. A shelter is a shell, usually made of dead tissue, for living organisms. Or so it says in a book called The monumental impulse: architecture’s biological roots.

Sevdah is a traditional folk music form from the Balkans. It is traditionally sung by women to other women and has Sephardic, oriental, Iberian, European and comic elements. They are women’s songs are about love and longing, losses, misfortunes and unfulfillment, and swell with desire and disclosure.

One is about a woman who has fallen in love, and a mother who is doing all she can to stop her.

Mother if I fall ill, do not call the doctor.
Mother if I do, do not call the rabbi
Let my coffin be carried out by ten of my former lovers

Another is about a someone who has fallen in love and their heart is broken:

What happened? How did I fall in love so hard, and why is it so painful?, she sings. Was it just us, or did the moon and the night do something to me?

Next time, may I fall in love during the day so it is not so painful.

It is difficult to describe the time of affective labour as it is a sphere in which everything done is undone endlessly in the physical realm, yet not in the emotional where there is constant building. Similarly, it is complex to talk about aggression with aggressive people.

Thoughts can become misshapen. Who is to say what the right shape is. There is obviously no right shape, but some shapes are not beautiful.

Sculpture can be a means of de-programming everyday behavior and experience.

The rocks watch like the sun and the moon, night and day. They are perhaps best seen by birds up there on the edge of the building, two storeys up above the street. The birds do not seem to suffer questions of being as we do.

The room had a soft, yellow ceiling. The suspended draped cloth contained a light source and the refracted yolk-yellow light from the painted cavity was cast downward into the white-walled room below giving it a golden and soft cast. The conditions in which to see other people’s auras were very favourable. The pillow of light around people was easily visible, so much so that it was clear that the aura was thicker in parts than in others and moved a little in its shape. We had expected it to be more even and static. The thin edge of the aura from time to time sprang apart into colours, like the effect of a prism or water. Like after a little bit of acid joins in, making everyone laugh together from a deeper impersonal joy.

A medium said that when someone feels a fluttery feeling like nervousness in the upper chest, that it is spirit guides coming close. So it is important to make friends with fear, and welcome it, and even be hospitable. And that we have more than a dozen helping each of us all the time whether we are aware of it or not.

Yellow pertains to the solar plexus chakra, and is the site of forces of digestion and transformation. That yellow without, like a flower, pulls on the yellow spinning orb within seems to be a valid sculptural point complicating the easy idea of object and space.

There is a theory that we are here on the earth plane to act out forms of separation so that our souls may have experience of it, and from there, achieve unity.

It is possible I don’t even tell myself things. I see other people doing this so surely I too must have this capacity.

The boy told one of his parents that he could see coloured sparks around people. He was six at the time. When asked about it two years later he said he made it up, and did not want to talk about it. He is a very honest child, so his parent was reluctant to believe him. She wondered if he was just losing touch with his ability to do this as he started to get older, and had assumed he must have made it up as it was not longer there for him as automatically. She wanted to try to encourage him to relax and see if it’s still there, afraid that he was losing something important and that she was dropping some kind of cosmic ball on his behalf. But she was assured that if this was going to be something in his life it would surface again when was sixteen or seventeen or eighteen.

He may be wanting to keep this to himself, and who would blame him. He can use this to read people, and it slows down the time in which he interacts with people to such an extent that people think him rude or backward. But he has more information to process, and may naturally not want to have his temporality examined. Things that are named and explicit are subject to control within organisations such as families or relationships.

She remembered that he once told her, while explaining the sparks and how they change as emotions shift in men and women he said that, “In the dark I can heal little things. I asked god when I was very small if I could be magic”.

He also asked if he was to become homeless could he come and live with her again. She said, of course. Shocked that he is thinking about this as a possibility, but kind of impressed that he realises that it is possible and is facing it already.

Homelessness is part of the experience of any form of migration, geographical or otherwise.

Sometimes it is because I want to keep something to myself, but other times it is because nobody is there to hear, or I want to disturb others less.

As I was growing up, we lived in the middle of a block for a reason. But that need has served its purpose and we live in the same place, but differently.

Love is a constant process of adoption. In a state of utter vulnerability to the unfamiliar largeness it demands we occupy. It may just be the shift from the limbic brain to the frontal cortex, from the smallness of emotions to relaxing back into the wide-open witness.