Thursday, February 26, 2009

this is not creative writing



i came to a slight realization on the bus this afternoon.

some biographical detail is required for this self-indulgence.

when i was really young, i used to write for pleasure. usually the writing occurred when sitting alone in the hallway outside of a classroom, after i had been kicked out by the teacher for disrupting my friends after having finished my work. in every subject except handwriting, i finished class assignments exceptionally fast and then became an exceptional nuisance to the teacher. one morning in the fourth grade, my notebook was taken from me after the teacher found it full of stories about monsters and daemons, knights and astronauts, and other mythologies about the past and the future. at first i thought that she was mad about the violence and gore which i frequently included, and perhaps even highlighted -- this was, after all, the era of the Reagan Star Wars laser defence shield and high-body-count television and action films. my parents were called in to the school for a meeting, and i found out that the teacher didn't like all of the swear words which i had used. my father told her that to keep me from acting up in class and getting kicked out into the hall, she should let me write down the words which kept me occupied. i remember his words from that afternoon very well: "any damn word he pleases".

and so from that day i kept writing for pleasure. for the transmutation of an afternoon into a semi-tangible vision. for the loss of ego into imagination. for the fruits of productive isolation. for the way that some of my words seemed to have been worthy enough to have been printed and read by others, who then generated more words in response. for the spaces and patterns made by the writing if you looked at the whole page and unfocused your eyes. for the way that after i produced and dot-matrix-printed a series of newspapers for myself, i felt like i was part of the media which captivated me from birth. for the simple control of the ink as it left my pen and tainted the paper. for the pleasure of both failure and success. for looking to the earth and the sky and reaching through time. for something to read.

words were fun because of their appearance and sound as well as their meaning. in this sense, the joy received by writing is precisely the joy of writing experiencing itself. pleasure in this context is a derivative of subjectivity. by the age of ten or eleven, i had come to appreciate the difference between the writing which gave me pleasure and that which was deemed "good" by virtue of adherence to function or evaluative protocol. while it may sound obvious, i really liked the pleasure, the pleasure as a pleasure. the functions or evaluation of my words provided no real feedback to me. so what if i received a perfect grade for something which i had written, when i knew that the writing had given me little harbour and as such was an essentially misrepresentative process? -- as an aside, the school projects from my youth which i have come to cherish most highly do not come from my representations of truth, but rather from fictions which i was able to pass off as truths: an en-francais book report and improvised oral presentation of a translation of James and the Giant Peach involved an elaborate inter-species taxi, cake delivery, and dating service; a history paper written in high school involved an invented civilization from the Eurasian steppes which was feared throughout the western part of the roman empire for their mounted female fire archers and which had been conquered through the religious practises of an equally non-existent but territorially-aggressive group of midget barbarians; an eighth-grade science report for an invented species of reptile involved several photomicrographs of tissue samples taken from my father's "cancer collection" along with an audio recording of its mating call which i had created using a two-litre pop bottle half-filled with used motor oil; a grade thirteen kinesiology paper which examined a fake west asian sport whose history and rules were inspired by the menu of a vegetarian all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. often, i would invent extended and cross-indexed bibliographies, and on one occasion i even forged the Dewey decimal cards which kept stock of the inventory at my high school library to prove the existence of several of the non-existent books referenced in a ten-page term paper to a teacher. all of this work received top marks from ostensibly qualified instructors at ostensibly well-regarded schools.

and i kept writing. on the back of a transfer, waiting for a bus. on a napkin, waiting for a friend to return from a restaurant bathroom. in the margins of a newspaper, waiting for my mother to return from a store. on the sides of packing boxes, waiting between lines of customers at work. on the sides of buildings, waiting for my city of Hamilton to return to life. the joy seemed to be that i could fill the time otherwise spent waiting for things to happen by elaborating the happenings of my own invention.

then university happened, and i lost my attention to the joys which free writing provided to me. for some reason my writing began to tailor itself to function more than to the self-reflexive/self-excessive process of writing. i began to write only when given either an academic or a financial opportunity. remuneration, that's what writing had become. more to the point, it seems as though i now only write when i feel that i have a purpose to do so. to relay information. to invite. to make a cultural sell. the joy of purposeless writing from my youth has departed from me. until i realized that i play with words all of the time. i can, in fact, not help but play with words whenever i am given the slightest opportunity.

sitting on the bus today, waiting for my laptop to boot while the snow-covered fields of industry rolled past my window, i came to understand the illusory fiction of purpose. society provides to us a definition of purpose as a geography inhabited by adults who must guide children and the irresponsible away from the random vectors of their instincts. purpose requires a judge, an evaluative agent which can dispense truth and due consequence within the bounds of reason created by the system of evaluation itself. "purpose" is the forced conscription of innocence and creative association into the armed guilt against pleasure which many in society define as reasonable and responsible function. "purpose" is a means of looking beyond oneself to view subjectivity solely within the circumscription of ecstasis: what can you do for others with your words and how will they use them? "purpose" burns off the body, rejecting corporeality as an impurity which detempers the truth of representation. it is a means of working for others for the purpose of instrumentality: I am my words, my words are the truth; you can trust me and here is what you need to know. to be subsumed to function is to engage in a self-inflicted form of wage slavery.

writing is a geography of play. woe to thee, land whose king is no longer a child.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie -- Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton



Art Gallery of Hamilton
January 24 to May 18, 2009

Christie Sealey is well-known for her intimate and expressive portraiture work. Since she and collaborator Richard Oddie have been residents of Hamilton their entire lives, it was only a matter of time before the city itself became her principle subject. Her new exhibition at the AGH examines the city as a constellation of subjectivities. She juxtaposes the intimacies of a moment, usually with another person but also with the environment of the city itself, with a sense of alienation and introspection. Her depiction of the 401 highway as it frames Cootes Paradise is particularly noteworthy, as is a portrait of a young woman seen reflected in the small mirror of a dilapidated washroom. Through her work, Sealey suggests the question am I really all of the things that are outside of me?

In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes audio work that Sealey constructed with Richard Oddie. Interviews with many of the city's residents are layered with location recordings from around the city to produce an audio program that invites narrative supposition.

For more information, please refer to the Art Gallery of Hamilton webpage.