The Reality of a Working Class Whale

Poor proletariat whale! He's on his way to clock in and look pretty on the cover of my very first zine. Anyhow, I'm sure you can understand my absence from the blog considering I was writing for the zine. What is a zine, you ask? Simply, it is a blog you can clutch and press to your heart (or some may say its a blog for chumps).

Anyhow, as usual, my ideas form (or step out of the mist of my grey matter) while I'm working on a piece to express those very ideas. Is this a case of acting before I think (aka hoof in mouth disease) or do my ideas only exist after they're articulated? Sounds like a linguists wet dream (linguists have notoriously subtle fantasies).

The entire zine unintentionally focused on reality as its mediated for us by different things. Wow, vague, I know. I'm not looking for anything metaphysical - I'm not your suburban wiccan (no offense small town witches) . Its really rather boring, but I think thats the point of it all.

The boredom of the summer is erasing all of me. Arguably, (but let's not argue - you say potato, I say tomato) memory is a creative act. There is no film or harddrive in our head. Everytime we remember something we re-create the narrative as accurately (or really however we see fit) as possible (considering we group many unconnected incedents into a narrative in the first place makes memory dubious). Think about a lot of your memories - do you see yourself instead of see from yourself?

Anyhow, as everything we see, hear, feel, etc. is mediated by our mind, our life is in the perpetual past. Given, the spark travels pretty quick from eye/ear/fingers to our thinking machine, but it still takes time. Okay: our memories are creative and our "present" is really in the perpetual past. Oh man, I think I'm hyperventilating, I'll be right back...

I'm sure you drew all sorts of weird conclusions while I got my paper bag, but to get to the boring point of it all that I spoke of. If the present is really memory the first time its remembered and memory itself is a creative act what happens when its boring? I'll level with you here: my life is crazy boring. Honestly 90% of my day is habit: work, eat, sleep, type blog, blah, blah, and blah. If our mind were a TV, reality were a show, and memories were re-runs, would I care to watch any of it? Honestly: no.

I'm not getting all nihilistic on you here (trust me: number one descriptor of yours truly: spunky). I just think I'm starting to understand Marcel Proust's point when he says that habit is what kills us.

The Little/Huge Gap

"I will have thought." Things happened, happen, or will happen. But how can something will have happened? How can anything happen in the future and the past simultaneously - in the future-past? Thus is the future perfect tense.
Stare at the future perfect for a while. Let it dissolve into its silly parts. Check out what surfaces. It's a gap. There's a small gap between what we say and what is.
Our language (spoken, written, and thought) builds a world for us, but it isn't necessarily the world around us. We often think of words as being permanently chained to their couterparts in reality. Is this really the case?
Try two things. First, make up a word. Make up a word for something that doesn't exist. Or think of the future perfect - a way of saying something that cannot be. Second, imagine something unknown that may exist but does not have a word for it yet (but leave it nameless). Or think of anything you know (like a stone, or a house) that only has a word that describes a group of things (like the word stone or house) but does not have a word (or name) to describe it individually.
The first thought tells us that there can be more words in our language than things to describe. However, the second thought tells us the opposite is true: that there are more things than words can name. Whats the point?
Well, I guess the point is... that there isn't one - that there can't ever be one. Not really, at least. The future perfect tells us that there is a tiny gap between what we say and what is. Is reality generally conveyed accurately in what we say, write, and think? Maybe, maybe not. The real question is: Can my world be represented perfectly by words and can words do their job perfectly? The answer has to be no. Words and the world they describe are not like me dancing in front of the mirror. It must be more like me dancing, and you imitating me. (Quick aside: we both think of 'dance' but are we thinking of the same dance?)
So is this a big deal? I honestly have no idea (yet). But it's out of that gap - that mystical little/huge gap between what is and how its said - that this painting came from. This is a painting of words without meaning and meanings without words, where they come to meet but don't match, from the non-existent future-past. This one was a painting of the gap between the thoughts of God and the words of men.