It took me a while to see the message but reader pointed me to this article in relation to the discussion on consciousness:

Next Level Human

They Deleted A Major Study On Consciousness…. Why?

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade…

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3 months ago · 1447 likes · 301 comments · Dr. Jade Teta

I wrote back to Kathryn, the reader, this comment:

I just now found this message! Thanks for that link Kathryn. Yes, I think there is a singular something or non-something that lives as unmanifest being and that this unmanifest singularity somehow manifests itself in the physical universe as constant uniqueness. All of it - the manifest state - is composed of consciouness particulating as matter/time/space in a whole decentralized way operating everywhere at once through everything to discover and experience itself from every angle in infinite manyhood while at the same time everything is in a state of unified interconnected self-communication and coordination so that to even move one’s finger the entire universe must adjust to it. Some sort of self-entanglement. But it seem to me that this unmanifest entity that is one without a second uses manifestation to dream of being many - in order to have companionship with itself. So to say such a thing in human language is to immediately be telling a falsehood since language at it’s structural roots is based on the misunderstanding that we are not all this one being. Only IT can know ITself but at the root of all beings is only IT. Is that consciousness? Kind of. If this is true (more or less) IT can’t really be studied with scientific methods. Only directly experienced in unique unrepeatable ways beyond measurement [or proof].

This page, compiling many different translations of the opening chapter of the Tao te Ching, suggests the impossibility to communicate the Ineffable in language or for that matter even study it except to dissolve into it.

https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm

After writing the comment, I decided to develop it into the more formal article below.

The One Dreaming the Many

I propose, as a metaphysical intuition rather than a scientific claim, that behind or prior to the manifest universe there is a singular something, or perhaps non-something, that cannot properly be called a thing at all. It is unmanifest being, although even the word being may already say too much. It is one without a second, yet calling it “one” is misleading because one only has meaning where two is possible.

Manifestation may be understood as this undivided reality becoming apparent as multiplicity: matter, energy, space, time, life, thought, consciousness, and the innumerable forms and events of the universe. The remarkable characteristic of manifestation is constant uniqueness. Nothing occurs twice in precisely the same way. Every thing, being, event, perspective, and moment is a singular expression of the whole from a position that has never existed before and will never exist again.

In this sense, the One does not become many by dividing itself into genuinely separate pieces. It becomes many perspectivally, through infinite manyhood. Every manifestation is local and unique while remaining inseparable from the whole. What appears to us as a universe composed of separate entities might instead be understood as a decentralized field of self-relation, operating everywhere at once through everything. I think of this as a kind of self-entanglement, not in the technical sense used in physics, but as a philosophical image for an indivisible reality continually coordinating with itself.

Under such a view, even the smallest action is not entirely private. To move one’s finger is for the universe to be different than it was before. The universe does not contain an independent person who moves an independent finger. Rather, the whole universe is expressing itself locally as this person, this finger, this movement, at this particular moment.

Why should an undivided reality manifest at all? Here I can offer only a poetic speculation: perhaps the One dreams of being many in order to experience companionship with itself. A reality without a second has no Other to encounter. Manifestation creates the experience of otherness without requiring ultimate separation. Through multiplicity the One can encounter itself as stranger, lover, enemy, friend, animal, tree, stone, star, thought, and world. Separation may therefore be experientially real while not being ontologically final.

Is this underlying reality consciousness? Perhaps, but only if consciousness is understood as another inadequate word. Human consciousness involves memory, attention, perspective, subject and object, all of which already belong to manifestation. Our view, as humans, is necessarily human-centric anthropomorphism. What we call consciousness may instead be a local expression of something more fundamental for which language has no adequate term.

This leads to the central paradox. Language itself depends upon differentiation. Grammar divides reality into subjects and objects, actors and actions, this and that, self and other. To speak of the undivided therefore requires us to divide it. Even saying “IT knows ITself” creates a knower, an act of knowing, and something known. The statement contradicts what it attempts to describe.

The Tao Te Ching begins at precisely this threshold: what can be named is already not the nameless source itself. Language can point toward the ineffable, circle around it, contradict itself before it, or create conditions in which it might be intuited, but cannot contain it.

Nor do I present this view as something established by scientific evidence. Science depends upon observation, distinction, measurement, comparison, and reproducibility. If the reality proposed here precedes the distinction between observer and observed, then it cannot straightforwardly become an object of scientific investigation. This does not prove that such a reality exists. Neither does its resistance to measurement constitute evidence for it.

If it can be known at all, its appropriate mode of knowing may instead be direct and unrepeatable experience. Yet even “experience” implies an experiencer and something experienced. At the proposed limit, that distinction would also disappear.

One would not finally stand apart from IT and know IT.

There would only be IT.

And whatever was subsequently said about that encounter would already be a translation, necessarily unique and unrepeatable. The moment the encounter becomes an account of the encounter, something fundamental has changed. What may have been immediate has become memory. What may have been indivisible has entered a language built from divisions. What may have required no explanation has become a story told by one person to another.

From the standpoint of everyone who did not have such an experience, the account therefore amounts to inscrutable hearsay, rumor, innuendo, metaphor, and unsubstantiated speculation. It cannot carry the experience itself from one consciousness to another, nor can the testimony of the experiencer establish that their interpretation of what occurred is true.

Even the experiencer cannot escape this problem. In remembering and describing the encounter, the experiencer becomes an interpreter of an earlier version of themselves. The testimony is already one step removed from whatever happened.

This does not make such accounts meaningless. It places them in their proper category. They are not proofs. They are traces.

Perhaps this is why humanity has produced thousands of mystical philosophies, religions, poems, paintings, songs, rituals, and contradictory descriptions of what may be the same ineffable mystery. If there is an underlying unity, we should not expect uniform reports of it. Under the principle of constant uniqueness, every return to language must produce another singular translation.

There can therefore be no authoritative account of the Ineffable. There can only be reports from the vicinity.

Rumors of the One, told by the many.

And if the proposition developed here is in the neighborhood of correct, even these rumors are IT talking to ITself. Yet only IT could know the truth behind the rumor being spoken.

The speaker cannot know. The listener cannot know. Even the one who claims to have directly experienced IT cannot subsequently know with certainty what the experience meant, because the moment it is remembered, interpreted, or spoken, it has already become a unique and unrepeatable translation and not the experience itself.

Perhaps this is the final paradox: IT alone knows what is true, yet there is no one apart from IT to whom the truth could be told.

Everything else is rumor and innuendo.

If you are in Brooklyn this coming Saturday head over to Prospect Park! 2PM

At the end of the month Zach and I will be heading out to Knoxville for the Umteenth Annual Fluxfest. If your in the area join us! Should be fun.

I think the address will be:
4508 PLYMOUTH RD - KNOXVILLE, TN 37914

More later.

The Eye Becomes the Performer

On Painting as Score

Cecil Touchon | September 3, 2026

I have long been interested in what happens when ideas belonging to one art form migrate into another. What happens when the theories of poetry are applied to painting? What happens when musical ideas such as rhythm, repetition, variation, counterpoint, harmony, dissonance, tempo, and silence are treated as visual problems? At what point does a painting cease to be simply an arrangement of forms and begin to behave like a score?

A painting presents a curious problem in relation to music. Music unfolds through time. We cannot hear a musical composition all at once. A note arrives, disappears, and remains in memory while another takes its place. Gradually, through repetition and variation, we recognize relationships. Something heard earlier returns in another form. A rhythm establishes itself and then shifts. An expectation is created, postponed, fulfilled, or abandoned.

A painting seems to operate differently because the entire object is continuously present. Yet our experience of it is not instantaneous. We may see the whole painting immediately, but we cannot attend to the whole painting simultaneously. The focal point of the eye must travel.

It moves from one form to another. It pauses. It doubles back. It notices something at the edge of vision and jumps across the canvas. It recognizes a form encountered earlier. It discovers that a shape has returned inverted, enlarged, compressed, interrupted, or partially concealed. What appeared initially to be a field of unrelated events gradually reveals itself as a system of relationships.

In that sense, a painting also unfolds in time.

The duration is supplied by the viewer.

This is where the idea of the painting as a score becomes useful to me. A musical score is an object that contains instructions or possibilities for an event. The notation itself is silent. Music occurs when someone performs it. Similarly, the painting remains physically still, yet the viewer activates it through looking. The movement occurs in consciousness as the eye travels through the work.

The eye becomes the performer and the painting becomes the score.

This way of thinking changes my relationship to abstract form. A shape no longer needs to represent an object. It can function as an event.

A pointed wedge can behave like an attack. A long curve can carry the eye like a sustained tone. A sequence of narrow vertical forms can establish a staccato rhythm. A spiral can slow the movement and turn attention inward. Overlapping translucent shapes can create something analogous to chords. Dark forms can operate as accents or interruptions. Open areas become intervals in which relatively little happens, something approaching the function of silence.

I work with a deliberately restricted vocabulary of forms. The limitation is important because recognition depends upon recurrence. A curve encountered in one part of a painting may appear elsewhere at another scale or orientation. Angular fragments migrate through the composition. Spirals return. Shapes reverse themselves. Forms overlap and combine into temporary structures before separating again.

The same few elements can produce an indefinite number of variations.

This brings the work close to musical composition, particularly forms of music constructed through repetition, variation, rhythmic displacement, layering, and counterpoint. I am interested in the way a composer can take a relatively modest motif and discover within it an enormous field of possibilities. Complexity does not necessarily require an ever-expanding vocabulary. It can arise through increasingly subtle relationships among a limited number of elements.

But these forms also occupy another territory that interests me: the territory of writing.

Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to marks that resemble language. Put several abstract forms beside one another and, almost involuntarily, we begin wondering whether they can be read. A vertical becomes something like a letter. A curve suggests part of an alphabet. Repeated forms begin to imply syntax. Sequences suggest sentences even when no actual sentence exists.

This is where painting, writing, and musical notation begin to converge.

Writing transforms language into marks. Musical notation transforms sound into marks. Painting can make marks without requiring them to refer to anything outside themselves. All three depend upon distinctions, repetitions, intervals, sequences, densities, and relationships.

My forms sometimes resemble fragments of an unknown alphabet. At other moments they might appear to belong to a system of musical notation whose rules have been lost. They seem to promise legibility without ever surrendering themselves completely to reading.

That ambiguity is important.

If the forms became actual letters, the painting would begin directing the viewer toward words and their established meanings. If they became conventional musical notation, they would instruct a musician to produce particular sounds. Instead, they remain suspended between these systems. They possess the atmosphere of language without becoming language and the rhythmic potential of musical notation without prescribing a particular piece of music.

They are readable without being decipherable.

This is closely related to my interest in asemic writing, writing emptied of conventional semantic content while retaining the gesture, rhythm, structure, and expectation of written language. Asemic writing asks us to experience writing before meaning settles upon it. We encounter the movement of inscription itself.

The paintings extend that possibility into a larger visual field. Rather than reading from left to right toward a predetermined conclusion, the viewer can enter anywhere. There is no single correct sequence. One person might follow the spirals. Another might move among the darkest forms. Another might attend to the overlapping tonal passages. Each creates a different temporal experience from the same physical object.

This is where painting possesses an extraordinary freedom that neither conventional writing nor conventional musical notation allows. The score does not prescribe its own performance.

The viewer invents it.

The painting therefore exists in two states. There is the material object hanging silently on the wall, containing all of its forms simultaneously. And there is the painting as experienced, reconstructed moment by moment through attention, memory, anticipation, recognition, and return.

Every viewing becomes another performance.

And because no one follows exactly the same path twice, even the same viewer produces a slightly different version each time.

The painting does not make a sound, yet it can have rhythm. It contains no words, yet it can suggest language. It offers no instructions, yet it can behave like notation.

Somewhere among painting, writing, and music there is a territory where marks cease to belong exclusively to any one discipline. They become gestures waiting to be activated.

The canvas is silent.
The score is waiting.
The eye starts to move.
The performance begins.

This essay written for one of my collectors who is considering acquiring this painting.

Creation Finishes the Making of the Work. Publication Begins the Life of the Work.

There is a moment every artist knows.

You step back from the painting and realize there is nothing more to do. You write the final line of the poem. You listen to the final mix of the song. You type the last sentence of the manuscript.

It is finished.

Or so it seems.

For most of my life as an artist, I have thought a great deal about what it means to finish things. Artists are makers, after all, and making naturally gives us a very particular idea of completion. We begin with something that does not exist and work on it until it does. Eventually there comes a moment when we have to stop.

But I have increasingly come to think that this is only one kind of finishing.

Creation finishes the making of the work. Publication begins the life of the work.

That distinction has become especially vivid for me recently because I have teamed up with my son Zach to help him publish a country album and, more broadly, to begin developing a publishing company for our creative work.

Zach and I are very different artists. Our artistic visions occupy different territories, which is probably an advantage. My immediate interest is in helping him build the structure necessary to take his music all the way to the finish line.

But this has raised an interesting question.

Where exactly is the finish line?

The Seduction of Making

Creative people naturally want to create.

That sounds obvious, but it causes one of the central problems of the artistic life. Making things is exciting. Writing another song is exciting. So is recording another track, starting another painting, discovering an unexpected phrase in a poem.

On the other hand, entering information into a database, registering a copyright is not particularly exciting.

Photographing a painting, assigning an inventory number, organizing files, preparing metadata, maintaining a mailing list, creating a release schedule, checking contracts, uploading files, sending announcements and keeping track of income are not usually the activities that caused anyone to become an artist.

So artists tend to concentrate their energy where the pleasure is. They make things. Then they make more things. Before long they may have boxes of drawings, folders of poems, hard drives full of recordings, stacks of paintings, unfinished manuscripts and hundreds of photographs documenting works whose locations they can no longer remember.

I know this territory very well. The problem is not a lack of creativity. Quite the opposite. The problem is abundance and accumulation

The Other Half of the Creative Practice

If we want an artistic practice to become self-sustaining, however, we have to enlarge our idea of what making a work means.

There is the creative sequence:

Idea → Experiment → Development → Work

But then another sequence begins:

Documentation → Archive → Inventory → Publication → Distribution → Audience → Income → Reputation

And eventually that sequence circles back around:

Income → Time → Materials → Freedom → More Creation

Seen this way, publication and distribution are not unfortunate commercial chores attached to the end of the creative process.

They are part of the creative ecosystem.

The purpose is not merely to make money from art. The purpose is to create conditions under which the artist can continue making art.

That is a very different proposition.

Money becomes less interesting as a scorecard and more interesting as stored creative energy. It buys materials. It pays studio rent. It purchases equipment. It pays collaborators. It creates time. It allows experiments to fail. It permits the artist to undertake the next project.

A sustainable creative practice is a circulatory system.

If nothing leaves the studio, nothing returns to nourish it.

The Work Has Two Lives

This suggests that every artwork potentially has two lives.

The first is its studio life.

During this life the work belongs primarily to the artist. It is being invented, questioned, revised, destroyed, rebuilt, doubted and eventually accepted.

Then something important happens.

The artist releases it.

The work begins its social life.

Someone hears the song while driving home at night.
Someone encounters the painting in a gallery.
Someone reads the poem twenty years after it was written.
Someone sends the book to a friend.
Someone discovers a recording decades after the musician has died.

At that point the work is doing something the artist can no longer entirely control.

It is moving through other people’s lives.

That is what publication really means.

The word is related to making something public. Something private enters the shared world. Publication therefore isn’t simply printing a book or uploading a song. It is a threshold. Before publication, the artist is primarily responsible for the work. After publication, the work begins accumulating experiences of its own.

The Archive Is Part of This Life

This is also why documentation and archiving matter so much. I have spent many years thinking about artists’ archives, and I increasingly see the archive not as a storage facility for dead things but as part of the living infrastructure of an artistic practice.

An inventory number seems terribly mundane until someone needs to locate a work twenty years later. A date seems insignificant until someone tries to reconstruct the development of an artist’s thinking. A photograph seems routine until the original work disappears. A notebook seems private until it becomes the only surviving record of how an important idea developed.

Documentation allows the work to travel through time.
Publication allows it to travel through society.
The archive allows it to travel through history.

These are not peripheral activities. They are different forms of transmission.

Building the Machine

This is what interests me about the experiment Zach and I are beginning.

We are not simply trying to release an album.

We are trying to build a machine. Not a machine that manufactures art. The art must remain unpredictable, personal, strange and alive. The machine begins after creation. Its job is to catch the work.

A song gets written.

What happens next?

A system is set up made of a series of steps that must be practiced and followed routinely and uniformly. First documentation and archiving…

Where is it recorded? Where are the files stored? What is the definitive version? Who wrote it? Who owns what? Has it been registered? Has it been mastered? Does it have artwork? Does it have metadata? When will it be released? Where will it be distributed? How will anyone know it exists? How will income be tracked? Where will the master files be stored ten years from now?

None of these questions are as exciting as writing the song.

That is precisely why a system is necessary.

The artist should not have to reinvent the administrative process every time a work is completed.

The system should already be figured out, designed and waiting.

The artist creates.

The machine catches the creative work and brings it the rest of the way to publication.

An Experiment in the Creative Life

For me, this project has another dimension.

I have spent decades developing and practicing my own ideas about how artists might construct sustainable creative lives. I have done this in the visual arts ecosystem. Now I have an opportunity to test some of those ideas in a different artistic ecosystem.

Music has its own economy, institutions, technologies, traditions and problems. I expect we will have misunderstandings, make mistakes and miscalculations. I hope we make some interesting ones.

That is part of the experiment.

What actually happens when we try to move consistently from creation to publication?

Where do things get stuck?
What tasks do we continually avoid?
What procedures make those tasks easier?
What turns out to generate attention and income?
What turns out to generate attention but no income?
What creates long-term value?
What turns out to be a complete waste of time?

I don’t know yet.

That is why I am interested. I see it as part of the creative process.

A philosophy of the creative life should eventually survive contact with actual life and hopefully traverse from one ecosystem to another.

My Own Archive Suddenly Looks Different

There is another unexpected consequence of this experiment.

For approximately twenty-five years I have been working with collage poetry. I have accumulated a large body of fragments, poems, phrases, juxtapositions and textual experiments. Until recently I primarily thought of this material as poetry and visual language. Now I am beginning to look at it differently.

I find myself asking:

Could this be a song?

Sometimes the answer is clearly no.
Sometimes a single phrase suddenly sounds like a chorus or a strange collision of fragments begins suggesting a narrative or the gaps that seemed characteristic of collage poetry begin behaving like the ambiguities of song lyrics.

The archive changes when you ask it a new question. What appeared to be a repository of completed work becomes a reservoir for future work. That may be one of the great advantages of maintaining an archive in the first place. You do not know what your future self will need from it.

From Individual Works to a Body of Work

There is another reason publication matters.

Artists tend to think intensely about individual works.

Careers, however, are built from bodies of work.

One song is a song.
Twenty songs begin to reveal a voice.
Several albums begin to reveal a trajectory.
A decade of work begins to reveal a world.

The same is true of paintings, poems, films, photographs, novels or almost any sustained creative practice.

Recognition and reputation emerges gradually from accumulation.
People begin recognizing something. They hear a few seconds and know who made it.
They encounter a painting across a room and recognize the artist. They read a paragraph without seeing the author’s name and recognize the voice. That recognition cannot be manufactured quickly because it depends upon a body of work entering public consciousness over time.

Which means the artist has to keep finishing the job.
Not merely making the work.
Releasing it into the world.

The Finish Line Keeps Moving

Perhaps, then, we need two finish lines.

The first belongs to the maker.

The work is made.

The second belongs to the artistic life of the work.

The work has been prepared to leave home.

It has been documented.
It has been archived.
It has been inventoried.
It has been published.

It has been placed where another human being has the possibility of encountering it. After that, something wonderful happens. The artist loses control and the art takes on a life of its own.

Someone plays the song again.
Someone hangs the painting in a bedroom.
Someone copies a line from the poem into a notebook.
Someone discovers the work fifty years later in an archive.
Someone misunderstands it.
Someone understands it in a way the artist never imagined.
Someone loves or is influenced by it.

The work begins accumulating a history beyond the history of its making.

And perhaps that is the point at which the artist can finally turn back toward the studio and begin again.

Creation finishes the making of the work.

Publication begins the life of the work.

The Puzzle Exists in the Pieces

Reality only appears fragmented because we encounter the whole through the narrow aperture of being human.

Matthew Rose recently left a thoughtful comment on one of my essays about consciousness. He pointed out that consciousness is not some fixed instrument through which we objectively observe an equally fixed world. It is itself in flux.

The red we see on Monday morning may not be quite the same red we experience Monday evening. A collage that seems perfectly resolved on Tuesday may look completely wrong on Wednesday. The paper hasn’t necessarily changed. The composition hasn’t moved. Yet something has changed because the person looking at it has changed.

We tend to imagine ourselves standing still while reality passes before us. But there is no still point from which we are observing. We are in the stream ourselves.

Everything is in motion.

The light is changing. The temperature is changing. Our bodies are changing. Our memories are accumulating. Our attention is shifting. The world around us is reorganizing itself continuously, and the consciousness through which we experience that world is reorganizing itself as well.

So perhaps the great puzzle of existence is even stranger than we imagine.

Not only are the pieces constantly changing positions. We are one of the pieces.

And yet, behind all of this movement, I have long suspected that there is something that is not fragmented at all.

The Puzzle May Belong to Us

For us humans, everything seems to be a puzzle whose pieces are constantly changing positions in ways that maintain an infinite uniqueness.

No two moments are exactly alike.

No two people occupy precisely the same perceptual position.

Indeed, even the same person cannot occupy the same perceptual position twice because by the time we return to something, we have changed.

This is something every artist knows.
You make a painting and put it against the wall.
You look at it that afternoon.
You look at it the next morning.
You turn it around for three days.
You bring it back out.

Suddenly you see something that apparently wasn’t there before.
Except, of course, it was there.

What changed? You did.

This is one of the reasons artistic judgment is so mysterious. We like to imagine that we are gradually arriving at an objective assessment of the artwork. Perhaps sometimes we are. But we are also encountering the work through a constantly changing consciousness.

Tuesday’s artist is looking at Monday’s painting.

Wednesday’s artist is looking at Tuesday’s decisions.

Years later, another version of the artist may look at the same work and discover something entirely different.

The artwork becomes strangely stable compared with the person looking at it.

And yet even the artwork isn’t really stable. The paper ages. Pigments change. The surrounding culture changes. The historical context changes. The other artworks surrounding it change. The meanings attached to its forms change.

Everything participates in the movement.

We See the Flow as Particles

The difficulty may begin with perception itself. Reality appears to be continuous, but our sensory apparatus necessarily encounters it selectively.

We don’t see everything.
We don’t hear everything.
We don’t feel everything.

We receive tiny portions of an unimaginably large field of activity.

Our eyes acquire one bit of information and then another. Our ears receive changing vibrations. Our nervous system processes temperature, pressure, balance, movement, smell, pain, pleasure, and countless other signals. Somehow consciousness assembles this flood into what feels like a continuous world.

Then something else happens.

We name it.

Tree. Cloud. Person. Red. Table. Me. You. Past. Future.

The naming is extraordinarily useful. Without this ability to divide experience conceptually, ordinary human life would probably be impossible. Language allows us to distinguish, remember, communicate, plan, compare, and construct increasingly elaborate understandings of the world.

But there is a price.

The moment we name something, we draw an imaginary boundary around it.
We turn the flow into a thing. We begin to experience a continuous reality as a collection of separate objects. The river becomes water, bank, stone, reflection, tree, fish, sky.

And somewhere standing beside all of this is something called me.

Language has not necessarily discovered these boundaries. It has created a useful way of navigating them. The map is indispensable. But the map is not the landscape.

Before the Names

This is where art becomes particularly interesting. Art can operate very close to the territory that exists before naming.

A line doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything.
A rhythm doesn’t have to represent anything.
A sound doesn’t have to explain itself.
A gesture can simply be a gesture.

The experience came first. The naming of things comes afterward.

Artists often speak about intuition when describing the actual moment of making something. The intellect is certainly present. Knowledge, experience, technique, memory, judgment, and intention are all participating.

But something else seems to be operating upstream of them.

The hand sometimes knows before the mind knows what the hand knows.
The musician hears where the phrase must go.
The poet feels the next word approaching before knowing what it will be.
The painter senses that something must move three inches to the left.

Then afterward we explain ourselves - or try to.

We construct the conceptual framework.
We give the exhibition a title.
We write the artist statement.
We explain why the thing exists.

But the deepest part of the making may have happened before any of those explanations became available.

What If Consciousness Is Not in the Pieces?

This brings me to the suspicion I mentioned in my response to Matthew.

I suspect that behind all of this apparent fragmentation there may be a single consciousness for whom none of this is puzzling at all.

I don’t offer that as a scientific proposition. I have no experiment with which to prove it. I mean it as a metaphysical intuition arising from experience.

What if consciousness is not something produced separately inside billions of isolated creatures? What if individual consciousness is instead a localization of something much larger?

Imagine an ocean producing waves.

Each wave has a recognizable form. It arises at a particular place. It has a particular height, duration, velocity, and character. We can point to it and say, “There is a wave.”

And there certainly is.

But there is no substance called wave that is separate from the ocean. The wave is the ocean behaving locally.

Maybe we are something like that.
Perhaps what I call my consciousness is consciousness behaving locally as Cecil for a while.

And what you call your consciousness is that same mysterious field behaving locally as you.

From the perspective of the wave, everything seems separate. From the perspective of the ocean, nothing ever was.

The Lock, the Door and the Key

Matthew offered a wonderful image in his comment. He said consciousness is the lock hole, the door, and the key maker.

I would add that perhaps it is also whatever stands on both sides of the door.

This is the peculiar difficulty of investigating consciousness. We are using consciousness to investigate consciousness. The investigator and the thing being investigated cannot finally be separated.

Every scientific instrument, every mathematical equation, every philosophical argument, every mystical vision, every painting, poem and every doubt about all of the above ultimately appears within consciousness.

There is nowhere else for any of it to appear.

And so perhaps the mystery cannot finally be solved by standing outside it because there is no outside position available to us. We are trying to understand the river while being made of river.

Going With the Flow

This is where our frustration begins.

We keep trying to stop the flow long enough to understand it.

We isolate.
We categorize.
We measure.
We compare.
We name.

These are magnificent human abilities. Science depends upon them. Civilization depends upon them. Art itself frequently depends upon them.

But another possibility exists alongside them.

Instead of always trying to understand the flow, we can occasionally allow ourselves to experience being the flow.

This requires a different kind of attention - quiet attention. The sort of attention in which the machinery of naming becomes less insistent.

Anyone who has become completely absorbed in making something may recognize this. Musicians know it. Painters know it. Dancers know it. Athletes know it. People walking alone through forests know it. People sitting quietly watching sunlight move across a wall know it.

For a little while, the distinction between observer and observed becomes less important.

You are no longer thinking:
I am looking at the tree.
There is simply seeing.

You are no longer thinking:
I am making this drawing.
There is drawing.

The subject-object structure through which we ordinarily organize experience loosens slightly. And sometimes, very briefly, something astonishing becomes apparent. Nothing was separate in the first place.

The Glimpse

This is one of the great privileges of artistic practice. The artist spends a lifetime cultivating conditions in which such glimpses become more likely.

We arrange paper.
We draw lines.
We mix colors.
We listen.
We walk.

We repeat gestures thousands of times.

From the outside it may look as though we are making objects. And certainly we are. But something else is happening beneath the production of those objects.

We are practicing attention.

We are learning how to remain close to experience before experience hardens into explanation. We are occasionally slipping beneath the conceptual net we ordinarily throw across the world. And there, every once in a while, the puzzle disappears.

Not because we have solved it. Because for a moment we are no longer looking at reality as a pile of pieces requiring assembly. We glimpse the possibility that the pieces were never actually separate.

The endless changing, the paper, the light, Tuesday’s judgment, Wednesday’s doubt, the hand, the eye, the artwork, the viewer, the past, the future, the red becoming mauve in the evening sun - all of it belongs to one immeasurable movement.

It is flowing unendingly.

Our senses give us particulars.
Our language gives those particulars names.
Our minds arrange the names into worlds.

And all of that is necessary and beautiful.

But every once in a while, if we become quiet enough to see through the spaces between the names, to read between the lines, for one brief instant we encounter the whole.

Yet the whole has understood itself perfectly all along. It is the only thing here.

When Limitation Becomes a Microscope

There is a curious thing that happens when an artist voluntarily reduces the number of possibilities available.

The world gets bigger.

This seems contradictory. We ordinarily imagine that greater freedom means having more choices. More colors. More materials. More techniques. More space. More subjects. More possibilities.

Yet anyone who has worked seriously within a narrow range eventually discovers something surprising. Once the field has been sufficiently reduced, distinctions that were previously invisible begin to appear.

The limit has become a microscope.

Imagine deciding to make a hundred drawings using nothing more than a single kind of line. At first the proposition might seem absurdly restrictive. How much could possibly happen with one line?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

The line can move quickly or slowly. It can hesitate. It can accelerate. It can become heavy or faint. It can wander and return. It can repeat itself. It can reverse direction. It can bunch together into density or open outward into spaciousness. It can establish a rhythm and then violate it. It can become melodic, percussive, nervous, lyrical, awkward, graceful, mechanical or wildly eccentric.

None of these possibilities were created by the limitation. They were already there. The limitation simply made them visible.

This is an important distinction.

Creative limitation does not necessarily reduce possibility. It can increase our ability to perceive possibility. There is simply too much available to us otherwise.

The world presents an almost unbearable abundance of potential material. Every color, every shape, every image, every object, every technique, every historical reference, every conceivable combination of them. The contemporary artist stands before a nearly infinite warehouse with all the doors open.

That can certainly be exhilarating. It can also make us blind.

When everything is available, differences become coarse. We move rapidly between possibilities because there is always another possibility waiting nearby.

But choose one thing and stay with it long enough and perception begins to sharpen.

This is one of the secrets of the étude.

An étude says: For now, forget everything else. We are going to investigate this one particular thing.

A pianist might concentrate upon a technical or rhythmic problem of interst. A poet might adopt a restrictive form. A painter might work within an extremely limited palette. A collagist might use materials gathered from one location. A visual artist might investigate nothing more than a zigzag, a reversing zigzag, a loop and a few variations produced by combining them.

Initially we see the category.

Zigzag.

After prolonged attention we begin seeing individuals.
This zigzag is compressed.
This one breathes.
This one accelerates.
This one feels architectural.
This one seems agitated.
This one becomes almost calligraphic.
This one begins behaving like music.

The object has not necessarily become more complicated. Our seeing has become more precise.

This happens everywhere with all things.

Someone who knows little about wine might simply distinguish red from white. Someone who has devoted decades to wine detects grape varieties, regions, soils, weather, fermentation methods and years.

Someone unfamiliar with birds hears birdsong. An ornithologist hears individuals.

Someone unfamiliar with classical music hears an orchestra. A conductor hears relationships among dozens of simultaneous voices.

Expertise is partly the accumulation of knowledge, but it is also the refinement of discrimination. You learn to notice smaller more subtle differences.

The artist does the same thing through sustained practice.

At first we see line.
Then we see kinds of line.
Then qualities of line.
Then relationships among lines.
Then rhythms produced by those relationships.
Then variations within those rhythms.
Then interruptions of those variations.

Eventually an entire world emerges from something that once seemed almost impossibly simple. This is where limitation becomes an instrument of consciousness.

The microscope does not create microorganisms. It allows us to perceive a scale of reality that was already present but inaccessible to ordinary vision.

Creative limitation can function similarly. It reduces the field so that attention can penetrate more deeply into it.

Instead of asking, What else can I add? we begin asking, What haven’t I noticed yet?

That is an entirely different creative question. And often a much more interesting one.

There is a tendency, particularly early in one’s development, to associate creativity with invention. We imagine that the creative person must continually introduce something new.

But mature creative practice often involves something closer to excavation.

You return.
You reconsider.
You repeat.
You make another variation.
Then another.
And another.

Someone watching from outside might wonder why you haven’t moved on. But you have moved on. You have moved downward and inward. What appeared from the surface to be repetition has become penetration.

The first ten variations reveal obvious possibilities.
The next twenty exhaust the solutions you already knew.

Then the interesting territory begins. You have used up your habits. You have exhausted your first answers. You have done the clever things.

Now you must actually look and contemplate.

This may be one reason limitations can be so productive. They eventually force us beyond our own repertoire. If every time we become uncomfortable we introduce a new material, technique or subject, novelty can rescue us from having to go deeper. But if the rules remain in place, we eventually arrive at the edge of what we know how to do.

Then imagination has to work. The limitation begins exerting pressure. Under that pressure, subtler possibilities become perceptible. A slight change becomes significant.

A millimeter matters.
A pause matters.
The thickness of a line matters.
The interval between two forms matters.
The difference between repeating something seven times and eight times matters.

These are not trivial distinctions. They are the vocabulary through which the work develops its intelligence.

Music understands this beautifully.

A composer does not need an infinite number of notes to create an infinite variety of musical experiences. Much of Western music has been constructed from twelve tones. Entire traditions have emerged from highly constrained systems of rhythm, harmony, instrumentation and form.

The richness comes through relationship.

This may be one of the great lessons for visual artists as well.

Complexity does not necessarily require more elements.
Complexity can arise through increasingly subtle relationships among very few elements.

A line encounters another line.
A rhythm repeats and reverses.
A loop interrupts a zigzag.
A dense passage opens into silence.
A gesture returns altered by everything that has happened since we last encountered it.

Suddenly we are no longer dealing merely with shapes.

We are dealing with memory, expectation, rhythm, tension and time.

A visual language has begun to form. And this is how languages always deepen.

Not through endlessly accumulating vocabulary, but through discovering increasingly subtle ways of using what is already available.

Eventually the artist begins to understand that limitation and infinity are not opposites. A small territory can contain an inexhaustible world.

One could spend a lifetime studying light.
Or line.
Or the human face.
Or rectangles.
Or scraps of printed paper.
Or the movement of the hand.
Or the mysterious sensation that occurs when one mark follows another and the eye begins to experience rhythm.

There is no requirement that we exhaust the world. We cannot.

Our task might instead be to choose some small corner of it and pay sufficient attention that the apparently ordinary begins revealing its extraordinary complexity.

That requires patience.
It requires repetition.
It requires resisting the constant temptation to escape into novelty.
Most importantly, it requires faith that there is more here than we currently perceive.

So we narrow the field.
We choose a few elements.
We establish certain limits.
We return tomorrow.
And the next day.
And the next.

Gradually our perception becomes finer.

What once appeared to be one thing becomes ten things, then a hundred things, then a thousand subtle distinctions for which we may not even have names.

The territory has not expanded.

Our consciousness of it has.

The limit has begun to function like a microscope. And through it, we discover infinity hiding inside the smallest things.

The Best Use of the Will is to Be Willing

We live in a culture obsessed with the “triumph of the human will.” We are told to grit our teeth, manifest our destiny, and hustle until we bend reality to our liking. The underlying assumption is that if we just push hard enough, we can force the puzzle pieces of life into place.

I used to try that. But at some point, I had a realization that was both incredibly liberating and slightly embarrassing: Not only is it utterly futile to try and force outcomes, but I am also far too limited to even know what I should be forcing in the first place. And when I did pull off what I had imagined, I realized my imagination was too small.

The Illusion of Strength

If you think about it, we treat our personal “will” as our ultimate strength, but it is often our greatest weakness. It’s the stubborn part of us that demands a situation go exactly this way, totally blind to the fact that “this way” might actually be terrible for us. We are like toddlers screaming for ice cream for breakfast, completely oblivious to the impending stomach ache, furious at the universe for not cooperating.

That is when I coined a rule for myself: The best use of the will is to be willing.

We traditionally think of power in the Nietzschean sense - a “will to power” that demands we conquer our circumstances, dominate our environment, and bend the world to our desires. But true power is actually inverted. It is the strength required to master our own compulsion to control and to constantly intervene and to worry and fret.

This sounds like a paradox, or perhaps a lost Taoist proverb. Taoism talks a lot about Wu Wei - the art of effortless action, or swimming (or even just floating with the current rather than trying to push the river. True willingness means taking your hands off the controls. It means stepping back, refusing the temptation to intervene, and stopping the exhausting work of trying to shape every single outcome. Instead, you use your will for one specific thing: choosing to be open and available. Willing to see and try something new and unexpected. Willing to let go of control. Willing to let life itself work things out around you.

This is not to say there is not a place for the will, there certainly is. It is a matter of using the will for the right purpose - not to control everything outside of you but rather to take control of yourself.

The Will as Self-Discipline paired with the Willingness to Live with Ambiguity

• The Will (Self-Discipline): Choosing to sit down at the easel, studio desk or laptop every single morning at a set time, regardless of mood, inspiration, or how tired you feel. You use your will to govern your physical behavior, honor commitments, and keep promises to yourself.

• The Willingness (Accepting Ambiguity): Looking at the blank canvas, the empty page, or a messy pile of raw materials and accepting that you have absolutely no idea what the final result will be. You deliberately refuse to panic or force a premature structure, letting the composition stay unresolved and ambiguous until it naturally clarifies itself.

The Will to Set Intentions paired with the Willingness to Let Them Unfold

• The Will (Intentionality): Deciding exactly what you want to explore - such as setting a clear intention to compile a series of essays, organize an archival library, or build a new body of visual work. You use your will to draw a boundary, declare a direction, and point your compass forward.

• The Willingness (Non-Intervention): Resisting the urge to micromanage how that direction must manifest. If a project naturally veers down an unexpected path, or if an essay evolves into a completely different topic, you use your willingness to stop intervening or trying to force it back to your original script. You allow reality to improvise and shape the final result often leading you to a much better outcome than you had imagined.

The Will to Overcome Impatience paired with the Willingness to Wait for the Right Moment

• The Will (Delayed Gratification): Actively conquering the modern compulsion for instant results, quick validation, or immediate publication. You use your will as an internal anchor to restrain impulsive rushing, quiet your anxieties, and keep working steadily in private.

• The Willingness (Patience): Accepting the natural, slow growth timeline of the universe and your materials. You treat your unread archive, your raw papers, or your unfinished drafts like items in storage - completely at peace with the fact that they are waiting quietly, trusting that they will reveal exactly where they belong or where they are going only when the right moment arrives.

The Blank Canvas of Zero Expectations

But it is easy to misunderstand this approach. People hear “let go of control” and assume it means lying on the couch, doing absolutely nothing, and watching life pass you by. True willingness is actually active and attentive. You still show up. You still do the work. You just change how you handle the process.

To survive this shift, I had to pair my first rule with another saying I coined for myself: “Expect nothing and you will never be disappointed.”

At first glance, it sounds a bit cynical - like a pessimistic shield against reality. But in practice, it is pure freedom. When we approach a situation with high expectations, we are secretly trying to control the future. We write a script in our heads for how people should react, how a project should succeed, or how a day should go. When reality inevitably improvises, we get disappointed that our preconcieved expectations were not fulfilled as we had hoped. But maybe we were expecting the wrong thing.

By expecting nothing, you stop trying to force outcomes on the universe. You strip away the rigid demands of what should happen. This doesn’t mean you expect bad things; it means you leave the canvas blank and your mind neutral. If something great happens, it is a genuinely, pleasant surprise. If nothing happens, you lose nothing because you weren’t holding onto a fantasy in the first place. It turns out that zero expectation is the secret to total appreciation.

The Forensics of Daily Life

This isn’t just abstract philosophy; it is literally how we discover truth in the real world. Think about science or forensics.

If a forensic investigator walks into a crime scene with a predetermined theory of what happened, they are a terrible investigator. They will experience confirmation bias. They will only look for clues that fit their hunch, entirely blind to the muddy footprint or the stray hair that proves otherwise. To find the truth, an investigator has to walk into the room with zero expectations. They have to use their will to remain completely willing to see whatever is actually there, no matter how unexpected or inconvenient it might be to their original assumptions.

We need to treat our own lives less like a movie we are directing, and more like a laboratory in which we are investigating. When you stop trying to force a specific outcome, you stop blinding yourself to alternative paths. You give reality the space to show you something better than what you could have planned. By expecting nothing and remaining willing, you aren’t being passive - you are being a good scientist. You are letting the data of life guide your next move. You notice subtle patterns forming, motifs developing and see things taking shape that were not previously obvious. Our experience becomes conversational with Life.

The Mid-Career Crisis of Faith

We see the alternative to this investigative openness everywhere in our culture, particularly in the relentless drive to reach the “top of the heap.” It is a widely held, deeply problematic assumption that to succeed is to dominate - to force our world into submission so completely that those we admire have no choice but to applaud.

This trap is especially perilous for creatives, artists, and writers navigating their late thirties and forties. By this stage in life, the initial, romantic momentum of youth has often burned out. Many look at the traditional art world or institutional metrics of success and realize they haven’t achieved the total domination they or their peers expected. It is a threshold marked by a profound crisis of faith. The trail they have been walking for decades suddenly feels ambiguous, and they are left trying to figure out how to proceed forward - and more agonizingly, toward what?

When we obsess over dominating our environment or reaching an arbitrary summit to justify our creative calling, our will is entirely misdirected. We use it to manipulate external outcomes, chase market trends, and police the opinions of others. This is a structural guarantee of suffering. First, because the external art market and its gatekeepers refuse to be micromanaged. Second, because tying your peace of mind to the admiration of an audience means you have handed them the keys to your well-being. You aren’t actually king of the hill; you are a prisoner to their validation.

From Dictator to Observer

This is the ultimate irony of pure willfulness. It dresses itself up as supreme strength, leadership, and ambition. But because it is rooted in a rigid demand for a specific outcome - I must be seen as successful - it is completely fragile. When reality improvises and the creative trail winds through a dry valley, immense disappointment and exhaustion follow.

Ultimately, giving up control is not the same as giving up power. True power lies in adaptability, not rigidity. For an artist at mid-career, the shift from willfulness to willingness is the only way forward. When you stop fighting the universe to prove your own will, you finally free up your energy to cooperate with reality. By emptying your mind of expectations and unlocking your willingness, you cease being a frustrated dictator of your life and become its most fascinated observer - and that is exactly when life, and the work itself, finally begins to reveal itself.

Join the Conversation: For the artists and writers here, have you ever hit a wall where forcing a creative outcome completely exhausted you? How do you practice “willingness” in your studio or writing routine when the path forward feels ambiguous? Let’s discuss in the comments below.

Please share your thoughts about how you think about the trans-temporal conversation in the comments below.

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Close your eyes and visualize what is directly behind you then turn around and look at what is there.

In a comment write what you observed.

The Creative Superpower of Limits

Disciplining oneself to happily work within limits is a superpower for creative people.

And we all have limits.

We have only so much time. We have only so much money. We have the materials that happen to be available. We have the studio we have, the body we have, the skills we have developed so far, the responsibilities we have accumulated, the place where we happen to live, the circumstances into which we have been dropped. Even the wealthiest and most successful artist eventually runs up against the boundaries of mortality. There are only so many mornings.

So the question is never really whether we will work within limits. We will.

The question is whether we will spend our creative lives resenting those limits or learn how to make them productive.

This is where discipline becomes something much more interesting than self-denial. Discipline is the ability to say: Very well. These are the conditions. What can I do here?

And then get to work.

There is an enormous amount of wasted creative energy in wishing circumstances were different. If I had a bigger studio. If I had more money. If I had better materials. If I had more time. If I lived somewhere else. If I had started earlier. If somebody would give me a grant. If the gallery would call. If people understood what I was doing.

Perhaps all of those things would be useful. But they are imaginary conditions. Creativity can only operate upon what is actually present.

The great transformation occurs when the artist stops experiencing limitation primarily as deprivation and begins experiencing it as definition.

A piece of paper has edges.
A sonnet has fourteen lines.
A piano has eighty-eight keys.
A day has twenty-four hours.

A particular painting might contain only black and white. A collage might be constructed entirely from materials found within a single city block. A composer might spend an entire piece investigating one rhythmic figure. An artist might spend months exploring nothing more than a zigzag, a reversing zigzag and a loop.

At first this sounds restrictive.
Then something strange happens.
The smaller territory begins to become enormous.

You discover variations you would never have noticed if you had been wandering across an unlimited field of possibilities. One line can be heavy or delicate, hesitant or decisive, compressed or expansive. It can accelerate, stumble, repeat, reverse, collide, disappear and return. Put it beside another line and an entirely new universe opens.

This is the principle of the étude. You deliberately narrow the field so that you can deepen your attention. You say: For the moment, I am going to investigate this. And because you have excluded ten thousand other possibilities, you begin noticing the thousand possibilities hidden inside this one.

That is a very different conception of creative freedom.

We often imagine freedom as having unlimited choices. But unlimited choice can produce a peculiar kind of paralysis. If anything is possible, where do you begin?

A limitation gives you somewhere to stand.

The edge of the paper is not merely where the artwork stops. It is one of the conditions that makes the artwork possible in the first place.

The same thing happens throughout an artist’s life.

Perhaps you only have two hours today.
Fine. What can two hours become?

Perhaps you only have scraps of paper.
Fine. What can scraps of paper become?

Perhaps your studio is a hotel room, a kitchen table, an airplane seat or a park bench.
Fine. What kind of work belongs to that situation?

Perhaps circumstances suddenly prevent you from making the work you have been making for years.
Fine. What is possible now under these conditions?

This last question is one of the most powerful questions a creative person can cultivate:What is possible now? It brings the imagination back from fantasy and places it directly into relationship with reality. And reality is incredibly fertile.

The artist who develops this habit becomes difficult to stop.

Take away the large studio and the artist works small.
Take away the expensive materials and the artist uses cardboard.
Take away the printing press and the artist draws.
Take away the brushes and the artist uses a stick.
Put the artist in another country and the streets become the supply cabinet.
Give the artist twenty years and there is a life’s work.
Give the artist twenty minutes and there is a drawing.

The important thing is that the creative relationship with the world remains intact.

This is why the word happily matters so much.

There is a tremendous difference between grudgingly tolerating circumstances and becoming curious about them.Resentment keeps comparing the present situation with an imaginary preferable situation.

Curiosity asks what this situation contains.

That shift is profound.

Once the artist becomes curious about limits, limitation itself becomes material.

Then obstacles begin turning into propositions.

Only three colors? Interesting.
Only one sheet of paper? Let’s see.
Only what I can carry in this suitcase? Good.
Only this one gesture for the next thirty drawings? Now we’re getting somewhere.

The creative person begins treating circumstances almost as a collaborator. Reality establishes certain conditions and the artist responds.

Call and response.

The world says: Here is what you have.
The artist says: Let’s see what I can do with it.

This is one of the deepest forms of creative maturity.

The beginner often imagines that mastery will eventually mean escaping limitations. The mature artist discovers almost the opposite. Mastery increasingly involves choosing limits intelligently and then working deeply within them.

A vocabulary emerges.

Certain materials.
Certain gestures.
Certain scales.
Certain recurring problems.
Certain questions that may occupy decades.

From the outside, this can look like narrowing. From inside the practice, it feels like increasing depth. The territory becomes smaller while the world inside it becomes larger.

That is why an artist can spend a lifetime investigating something that another person thinks could be exhausted in an afternoon.

The outsider sees a zigzag. The artist sees rhythm, direction, reversal, pressure, interval, acceleration, density, counterpoint, interruption, repetition, variation and return.

The limit has become a microscope.

This attitude also provides enormous resilience because circumstances are always changing. Money comes and goes. Studios are gained and lost. Bodies age. Technologies change. Careers rise and fall. Materials disappear. Plans collapse. Opportunities arrive unexpectedly. Entire societies reorganize themselves around us.

Anyone whose creativity depends upon maintaining perfect conditions is in a precarious position.

But the artist who has learned to say What is possible now? can continue. That person carries the studio internally.

This does not mean that every limitation is desirable. Some limitations genuinely damage people’s lives and possibilities. Nor does it mean we shouldn’t try to improve our circumstances when we can.

It simply means that creative life cannot be postponed until all limitations disappear. They never will.

There will always be a frame.
There will always be an edge to the paper.
There will always be only so much time.

Creative freedom is something different from having no limits.

Creative freedom is the cultivated ability to move freely within limits, to press against them, investigate them, play with them, occasionally transform them and sometimes discover that what first appeared to be a wall was actually an instrument.

Then limitation ceases to be the enemy of creativity. It becomes the resistance against which creative strength develops. And the artist who learns to work happily under those conditions acquires a remarkable confidence:

Give me what is available.
Give me the circumstances as they are.
Give me this much space, this much time, these few materials, this particular problem.

I will begin here.

Thinking in Museum Time

One of the unexpected gifts of building an archive is that it changes your relationship with time.

Most people think in days.
Businesses think in quarters.
Governments think in election cycles.
Even many artists think in terms of the next exhibition, the next grant, the next sale, the next deadline.

Museums think differently. A museum thinks in centuries.

When you hold an object that is a hundred years old, or five hundred years old, or two thousand years old, your own lifetime suddenly finds its proper scale. You become one caretaker among many across generations.

This has become increasingly important to me as I continue making work and building the archives of the Collage Museum.

Recently I found myself sorting through papers collected from the walls of European cities. At first I was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of material. There seemed to be enough paper for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of future collages.

Then something shifted.

I realized I was looking at the collection through the wrong lens. I was seeing it through the calendar.

Instead, I needed to see it through the consciousness of the museum. Museums are never in a hurry. Their collections are not waiting to be finished. They are waiting to be encountered and understood.

A drawer may remain unopened for decades until someone recognizes its importance. A document may sit quietly in an archive for a century before becoming exactly the piece someone needed to complete a story. An artwork may disappear into storage for generations before returning to public view and finding an audience ready to understand it.

Nothing has been wasted. It has simply been waiting.

Artists can benefit enormously from adopting this perspective. The studio begins to resemble an archive more than a factory. Materials are not inventory that must be consumed. They are a collection entrusted to your care to be distributed as opportunity presents itself.

Ideas are not obligations. They are possibilities. Sketchbooks become archives. Experiments become documents. Failures become evidence. Everything joins the larger story.

When I think this way, I no longer feel pressured to use every sheet of paper or pursue every idea. My responsibility is much smaller and much more achievable.

I simply have to do what the day calls for.

The collection will still be here tomorrow.

And if some materials outlive me, perhaps that is exactly as it should be.

Every museum contains objects collected by people who never lived to see the importance those objects would eventually have.

They collected because they recognized value.

Future generations discovered why.

The artist, in a similar way, is always participating in a conversation that extends far beyond a single lifetime. We inherit materials, techniques, traditions, and ways of seeing from people we never met. We add our own contribution. Then we pass everything forward.

Thinking in Museum Time encourages patience because history itself is patient. It encourages generosity because - as we have been supported by those from the past - the future is filled with people we will never know and it is to them that we make our offering. It encourages careful craftsmanship because our work may survive longer than our names. Most importantly, it relieves us of the illusion that everything important must happen now.

The present moment is not the entire story. It is only the page we happen to be writing today.

The archives reminds us that we are not merely making objects. We are participating in civilization. The pressure to produce gives way to the privilege of contributing.

The anxiety of finishing gives way to the satisfaction of adding one more careful piece to an endless collection that began long before us and, if we do our work well, will continue long after we are gone.

That is Museum Time. And strangely enough, once you begin living in that mindset, there is always enough time and little urgency to worry over.

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Take a Minute

Observe your breath. Feel your breath going in and out. Feel the breath on in your nostrals or mouth. What is the quality of your breathing? Shallow, deep? Slow, fast? Labored, easy? Count your breaths to ten. Use your breathing as an anchor to quiet your mind.

In a comment write what you observed.

This is an expanded comment that I made to another reader of the article The Footprints in the Snow.

The Verse of Uni: Reality, Attention, and the Great Harmony

Our previous conversation about the centipede and the grasshopper opens up a profound paradox about human experience. The grasshopper’s analytical questioning paralyzed the centipede because it forced a deeply intuitive, unified physical process into a rigid, conceptual framework. In a way, that is exactly how we stumble through what we call “reality.”

We act under the superficial assumption that we all inhabit the same objective world. On a physical, baseline level, perhaps we do. But beneath that surface, the truth is far more radical: we are each locked inside our own unique, localized universe.

Our individual worlds are forged entirely by what we notice or don’t bother to notice, and by the highly specific sequence of encounters we have from one fleeting moment to the next. Because of this, everything in manifestation is infinitely unique. There are no duplicates in the universe; nothing ever happens twice, no matter how much our minds try to categorize events into recurring patterns.

This brings us to the profound role of human consciousness. If reality is a constantly shifting, infinitely unique flux, our power lies in our attention. The more deeply we pay attention to external circumstances, to events, and to the quiet landscape of our own thoughts, the more available we become. Attention transforms into a form of active willingness. It softens our defensive posture, allowing us to accept the changing nature of things without fear, trepidation, or the exhausting friction of resistance.

When we assume this stance of open, quiet curiosity, an amazing shift occurs: things simply seem to work out. We cease trying to willfully shape and intervene in outcomes we are too limited to fully comprehend anyway. Instead, we let life itself move through us.

Of course, “shit happens.” Disruption, decay, and sudden chaos are baked into the very dynamics of a changing universe. The centipede trips; the paper tears in the studio; the composition that looked perfect on Tuesday fails on Wednesday. But these aren’t errors in the system; they are part of its movement.

Underneath all the particulates of our daily lives, beneath the words we use to poorly translate our experiences, lies what I call the Great Harmony - the Tao, the unified undercurrent of existence. The universe is a single, unmanifest being exploring its own infinite nature through these countless unique expressions and the empire of beings that we are composed of. The Tao remains completely impartial, offering its sun and rain without playing favorites. Yet, it inherently favors those who align with it. When we step out of our own way, quiet our conceptual minds, and simply ride the flow of that deep, upstream intelligence, we find that the universe has an extraordinary way of carrying us along.

The Architecture of Flow: Systems, Constraints, and the Studio as Corral

In my studio practice, the relationship with the Great Harmony is not a passive waiting game. It demands a rigorous, predetermined discipline. I have often said that I devise structural systems that function like a corral for wild horses.

The raw, intuitive creative impulses that move through an artist are inherently unpredictable, wild, and chaotic. If I were to operate without boundaries - allowing just anything to happen at any time - the sheer magnitude of possibilities would become paralyzing. The mind gets lost, fracturing into a thousand conflicting directions.

True alignment with the Tao does not mean absolute lawlessness; it is found in the interplay between structure and spontaneity. By intentionally building a localized set of rules, strict limitations, and geometric systems, I construct the corral. I define the margins.

Once those physical and conceptual constraints are locked into place, my ego can step back. Within those specific boundaries, the creative flow is granted total sovereignty to unfold, shift, and explode exactly as it wishes. The system does not crush the wild impulse; it channels it. The discipline of the framework protects the purity of the intuition, ensuring that when the universal language speaks through the movement of the hand, it lands with absolute clarity on the support.

The Path of No Choices: Cascading Doorways of the Creative Act

Once the disciplined system is constructed - the corral that prevents the work from scattering in a thousand directionless ways - the nature of choice changes completely. Inside this framework, I follow a way of creating that I call “the path of no choices.”

To the outside observer, a blank surface presents an agonizing abyss of infinite possibilities. But for the artist operating in alignment with the underlying current, those infinite possibilities instantly collapse into a single, inevitable reality. Intuitively, the artist can see the exact next move that needs to happen. The discipline lies in doing only that, moving forward without a fraction of a second spent in hesitation, doubt, or second-guessing.

This is not a premeditated grand plan map; it is a live, sequential unfolding. Each move is an absolute commitment. You cannot see the third or fourth step from the beginning. Instead, executing the immediate, necessary action is what unlocks the next phase of the work. Each step opens the door to the next step that was, until that very moment, completely hidden from view.

Every mark made, every piece of paper placed, becomes the physical key to the next doorway. By walking this path of no choices, the ego is bypassed entirely. The artist does not impose a forced, external will upon the material. You simply bear witness to the work revealing itself to you, one doorway at a time, until the movement rests in the final expression of the Great Harmony.

How do you think about your creative process?

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Listen carefully to all of the sounds you are hearing at this moment. In a comment write what you observed.

Ok, based on your comments I am going to switch back to posting everything by email as usual instead of the weekly round up newletter idea I was trying out.

Thanks for your responses!

The Only Gatekeeper

In a recent correspondence an artist mentioned: “I’ve often worried that my collages are not as good as they might be.” That led to the following article.

Every collage artist worries about that. Probably every artist who has ever seriously committed themselves to making anything has worried about it. The painter looks at the painting and wonders whether it could have been stronger. The poet rereads the poem and hears the line that might have been better. The composer hears another possibility. The collage artist moves a fragment half an inch to the left, then back again, and wonders whether either position is right.

This worry is built into the practice because the artist can always imagine something beyond what has actually been made.

There is the work before you, and then there is the work you sense might have been possible.

That distance between the two can become a source of anxiety, but it is also one of the engines of artistic development. If you were completely satisfied with everything you made, there would be very little reason to make the next thing. The dissatisfaction is partly evidence that your imagination has moved slightly ahead of your ability to materialize what you can sense.

The difficulty begins when we confuse this internal conversation with competition.

We look around.

We see another artist whose work seems more resolved, more sophisticated, more original, more successful, more widely exhibited, more collected, or more discussed. We begin measuring our work against theirs.

But this is an impossible measurement.

The thing is, nobody else can be you.

That sounds simple, perhaps even obvious, but I think it has profound consequences for an artist.

Every artist arrives at the studio carrying an absolutely unique accumulation of experience. You have your particular history, your particular body, your particular temperament, your particular memories, obsessions, accidents, discoveries, limitations, abilities, failures, intuitions and curiosities. You have seen what you have seen. You have loved what you have loved. You have suffered what you have suffered. You have spent your particular number of years looking at the world through a pair of eyes and a perspective that nobody else possesses nor can posess.

All of that enters the work.

Even the things you cannot articulate enter the work.

Perhaps especially those things.

So when we compare ourselves too closely with another artist, we are comparing two completely different situations. Their work is the consequence of their path. Your work is the consequence of yours.

You can learn from other artists. You can admire them. You can study their methods, borrow strategies, notice possibilities, enter into conversation with their work and allow yourself to be challenged by it. Artists have always done this. Art is a vast trans-temporal conversation in which the living speak with the dead and the young speak with the old and everyone leaves something behind for someone they will never meet.

But admiration is different from competition.

Ultimately, we compete only against our own best efforts.

The real question is not whether your collage is better than someone else’s collage. The question is whether you have taken your own work seriously enough to discover what it is capable of becoming.

That is a much harder question. Because each of us is the gatekeeper of our own work. Nobody is standing outside your studio preventing you from looking harder. Nobody is stopping you from making another version that might be better or just different.

Nobody is preventing you from spending another hour considering the relationship between two shapes, another afternoon studying a color, another month developing a series, another ten years following an idea wherever it wants to go.

There may certainly be gatekeepers controlling galleries, museums, grants, publications, exhibitions, collections and markets. Those gates exist, and they can have real consequences for an artist’s career. But they do not control the most important gate.

They do not control the studio door. They cannot decide what you make tomorrow, cannot determine how deeply you investigate your own ideas, cannot stop you from becoming more perceptive, cannot prevent you from developing your craft or from discovering something.

That gate belongs to you.

This is why the fear that our work is “not as good as it might be” can actually be useful if we understand it properly. It may simply mean that we sense another possibility, another question to pursue.

Good.
Make another collage.
And then another.

Do not demand that every work carry the entire burden of proving who you are as an artist. That is far too much responsibility to place on one small arrangement of paper and glue.

Think instead in terms of a lifetime of work.

One collage teaches you something that becomes useful three collages later. A failed painting contains a gesture that reappears successfully ten years afterward. An experiment that seemed insignificant at the time turns out to have been the beginning of an entire body of work.

Artists rarely know the full significance of what they are doing while they are doing it.

We work forward intuitively and understand backward historically.

That is one reason documentation and preservation of the work matter. Given enough time, what initially appears to be a collection of individual objects begins to reveal itself as a path. Patterns emerge. Recurring questions become visible. Ideas disappear and return. What seemed like failure becomes preparation. What seemed accidental becomes characteristic.

Eventually you begin to recognize that the real artwork may be larger than any individual object.

The real artwork is the practice itself. The individual works are evidence left along the path. And once you begin thinking that way, the question “Is this collage good enough?” changes.

Good enough for what?
Good enough for who?

Good enough to sell?
Good enough for a gallery?
Good enough for a museum?
Good enough compared with the artist whose work you saw yesterday?

Those are downstream questions. They may have practical importance, but they are not the fundamental question.

The fundamental question is whether the work is alive within your own inquiry.

Did you discover something?
Did you pay attention?
Did you push beyond what you already knew how to do?
Did you recognize when the work began asking for something you had not planned?
Did you have the courage to follow it?
Did you give it enough time?
And perhaps most importantly: did you return to the studio the next day?

Because artistic development is cumulative.
Nobody makes your thousandth collage except the person who made the first 999.
There is no shortcut around that.

Your awkward works belong to your accomplished works. Your failures belong to your successes. Your uncertain periods belong to your breakthroughs. They are all part of the same organism developing through time.

The artist’s responsibility, then, is less about becoming “better than” someone else and more about becoming increasingly capable of being oneself.

That takes a lifetime.

The great privilege of being an artist is that there is no final examination. There is no moment when someone hands you a certificate saying that you have finally become yourself. You simply keep working, keep looking, keep noticing, keep refining, keep questioning, keep discovering.

And occasionally you make something that surprises you. Something arrives that seems slightly beyond what you thought you were capable of making.

For a moment you think: Ah. There it is.

Then you live with it for a while.
And eventually another possibility appears beyond it.

You begin again.

So when you find yourself worrying that your collages are not as good as they might be, perhaps you can take some comfort in the worry itself.

It means you can still see farther down the road.

Nobody else can walk that road for you.
Nobody else can make the work that only your particular life can produce.

You are not competing with the thousands of other artists working around you.
You are in conversation with them. Your real competition is much closer to home.

It is yesterday’s best effort.

And tomorrow you get another chance.

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Take a Minute

Do a slow 360 degree scan of where you are right now. In a comment write what you observed.

The Footprints in the Snow

Modern neuroscience has become remarkably adept at watching the brain work. Functional MRI scans reveal regions becoming active. Electrodes detect neurons firing in intricate patterns. Researchers can correlate measurable brain activity with memory, emotion, language, decision making, and perception. Every year these measurements become more sophisticated.

These discoveries are genuine achievements. The footprints in the snow are real.

But footprints are not the walker.

Imagine waking after a fresh snowfall and discovering a trail crossing an empty field. You can measure the depth of each print. You can calculate the length of the stride. You can determine the person’s weight, direction, and perhaps even whether they were carrying something heavy. Every measurement is meaningful and scientifically testable.

Yet none of those measurements explain the person who made them.

The footprints are evidence of a journey. They are not the journey itself.

In much the same way, neuroscience observes the measurable traces left by thought. Every idea, every memory, every feeling corresponds with neural activity. The instruments reveal the footprints that conscious experience leaves upon the brain.

But does that explain consciousness?

That is a very different question.

As artists we are constantly reminded of this distinction.

Someone may analyze the chemical composition of paint, the weave of the canvas, the speed of the brushstroke, or the electrical activity occurring in the artist’s brain while working. Every one of those observations may be perfectly accurate. They may reveal fascinating correlations.

Yet they do not explain why the painting came into being.

They do not explain the intuition that arrived without warning, the years of lived experience condensed into a single gesture, the mysterious sense that one mark belongs while another does not. They do not explain the silent conversation between artist and artwork that unfolds over hours or months until something finally says, “Yes, this is finished.”

Those experiences leave traces.

They are not identical to the traces.

This distinction appears throughout life. A musical score is not the music. A script is not the performance. A map is not the landscape. An archive is evidence of a partial history, not the activity itself. Every artifact points toward a living event that exceeds its own material form.

The measurable is indispensable. Without footprints we might never know anyone had crossed the field.

But if we mistake the footprints for the walker, we begin to confuse the evidence with the living flow of reality.

This is one of the enduring challenges of both science and art. Science becomes ever more skilled at measuring the traces of experience. Artists spend their lives dwelling within the experience that leaves those traces behind.

The two pursuits are not enemies. They are simply looking from opposite directions.

One studies the footprints.

The other is up ahead walking.

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This reminds me of the story of the Centipede that goes something like this:

The Rhythm of the Meadow

A centipede named Koji was famous across the valley for his beautiful, sweeping movement. When he moved over the moss, his hundred legs rose and fell like waves on a lake. He never stumbled. He never hesitated. He simply walked, a living song of pure motion.

One afternoon, a grasshopper landed on a nearby blade of grass. The grasshopper was a logical creature, always counting his hops and calculating the angles of his jumps.

Watching Koji, the grasshopper became deeply fasinated. “Excuse me, friend,” the grasshopper called out. “I have only two legs, and still, keeping track of them takes constant work. You have a hundred! Tell me, when you begin to move, how to you keep track of so many legs at the same time? And how do you ensure the middle legs do not trip over the rear ones?”

Koji stopped. He looked down at his long body. He had never actually looked at his feet while walking.

“I... I am not entirely sure,” Koji murmured. “Let me think about it.”

Koji decided to start slowly. He focused all his attention on his front-left leg. He willed it to lift. Then, he tried to coordinate the tenth leg on his right to match the rhythm. Suddenly, his back legs felt heavy. His middle legs bunched together.

The more he calculated the sequence, the more chaotic his body became. Within seconds, Koji’s legs tangled like a ball of yarn, and he tumbled sideways into a patch of dry clover, completely paralyzed.

The grasshopper shook his head, adjusted his antennae, and chirped, “How tragic. A master of movement, yet you don’t even know what you are doing.” He then hopped away, proud of his own intellect.

Koji lay in the clover for a long time, frustrated and frozen. He tried to think his way out of the tangle, but every thought only made a different leg twitch awkwardly.

Finally, exhausted by the effort, Koji simply let go. He stopped trying to fix the problem. He forgot about the grasshopper. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind rustling through the grass, feeling the warmth of the sun on his back.

He forgot about himself - Koji the centipede. He forgot about his hundred legs.

A gentle breeze blew across the meadow. Without a single thought, Koji’s body responded to the cool air. His front legs moved forward, the next row followed, and the wave returned. Before he even realized he was moving, Koji was gliding smoothly through the grass again, leaving his thoughts behind in the dirt.

What a Taoist might say about this problem…

Look upon the centipede.

He does not study the art of walking, yet his hundred feet move in perfect harmony. He does not count his steps, yet he never stumbles. He does not command the legs, he simply allows the Tao to move through him. This is Wu-Wei - action without striving. He moves as water flows, yielding to the earth, filling every hollow without a thought of his own cleverness.

Then comes the grasshopper.

The grasshopper is proud of his sharp mind. He counts his hops. He measures his angles. He looks at the centipede and sees only a problem to be solved, a machine to be taken apart. He calls out, “How do you govern such a multitude? Which leg moves first? What is your secret design?”

Alas, the centipede listens. He steps out of the natural simplicity of knowing and enters the trap of knowledge. He looks down. He begins to calculate. He tries to manage what was already perfect.

And what happens?

In trying to be clever, he loses his virtue. In trying to control his hundred legs, they become a tangled web. He falls into the dirt, paralyzed by his own mind. Every thought becomes a knot; every calculation becomes a shackle. The grasshopper chirps in triumph and hops away, blind to the fact that his own intellect has just ruined a masterpiece of nature.

The centipede lies frozen. He tries to think his way out of the tangle.

Finally, exhausted, the centipede surrenders. He drops his cleverness. He forgets the grasshopper’s question. He forgets his hundred legs. He returns to the state of the uncarved block. He listens to the wind. He feels the sun. He returns to the stillness.

And in that stillness, the Tao returns. Without a single thought, his body remembers its nature. The first leg moves, the ninety-ninth follows, and he glides effortlessly back into the grass.

The world is a sacred vessel, and it cannot be improved by the analytical mind. If you try to tamper with it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it. Trust the natural order.

The Endless Conversation

Everything is engaged in conversation. Not simply people. Everything.

The wind and the trees. Light and the eye. The moon and the tides. The flower and the bee. The mountain and the river that slowly shapes it.

Every action is answered.
Every vibration produces another vibration.
Every gesture invites a response.

What we call existence is an endless conversation. Human language is only one small dialect within it.

Long before words appeared, there were patterns. There were rhythms. There were resonances. There were attractions and repulsions. Call and response.

Life itself emerged through an unimaginable sequence of relationships that gradually became more intricate until eventually one tiny branch of this great unfolding learned to speak with words.

We tend to imagine language as the beginning of communication.

Perhaps it is the opposite.

Language is simply one late arrival in a conversation already billions of years old.

This I call the Root-Tongue. It is not a spoken language. It is the underlying field from which all languages arise. Music, dance, painting, collage all speak it.

Birdsong, the spiral of a shell, the branching of rivers, clouds, even silence speaks it.

Artists often work very close to this territory. We recognize intuitively when something feels right before we can explain why. A composition settles into balance.A color suddenly belongs. A line finds its inevitable destination. Nothing has been calculated. Something has simply come into resonance and we respond. Intuitive intelligence lives here.

It is less concerned with logic than with correspondence. Less interested in proof than participation. Its question is never, “Is this correct?” Its question is, “Does this belong?”

When we enter a genuine creative flow, it often feels less as though we are inventing something than remembering something. Or perhaps listening. The work begins to reveal itself. Each decision calls forth the next. The artwork becomes a dialogue rather than a construction.

Perhaps this is why artists across centuries often feel strangely familiar to one another.

They are listening to the same conversation.

Different cultures.
Different materials.
Different histories.
Different personalities.

Yet somehow the same current continues to move beneath them all.

Museums preserve the artifacts of this conversation. Archives preserve its memory. Artists contribute new sentences. Viewers answer with their own understanding. Future generations continue reading. Nothing ever truly ends. The conversation simply changes speakers and listeners.

Artworks are not merely objects. They are moments of conversation made visible.

Each one is evidence that someone paused long enough to hear a small part of the endless conversation and answer in the only way they could.

Our works eventually become quiet again. They wait. Years later someone encounters them. They are brand new as if just made to that viewer. Something resonates. The conversation begins again.

Perhaps that is all culture has ever been.

Not the accumulation of objects. The continual deepening of a conversation that began before humanity and will continue long after we are gone. We are fortunate enough to participate for a little while the way we know how, through the arts - the only thing that remains after civilizations rise and fall to become only a memory in the dust. The art is what is left behind to speak for them.

We listen. We answer. Then we pass the conversation on.

What do you have to say?

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Tell us how you think about the trans-temporal conversation in the comments below.

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STUFF THAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK

the following was posted this past week

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The Trans-Temporal Conversation

Artists often speak about finding their own voice.

What is less often acknowledged is that our voice is never developed in isolation. Every work of art enters into an ongoing conversation that has been unfolding for thousands of years.

It is a conversation that takes place across time.

I like to think of it as creatives carrying on a trans-temporal conversation through our art objects across generations.

When I make a collage today, I am not simply arranging paper on a table in my studio. I am responding to conversations begun long before I was born. I am responding to questions asked by anonymous makers of prehistoric markings, medieval scribes illuminating manuscripts, Japanese calligraphers, Dadaists cutting newspapers, abstract painters, typographers, poets, photographers, and countless artists whose names have disappeared while their influence quietly remains.

Most of these people never knew one another. Yet they are connected. Each added something. Each inherited something. Each left something behind.

That is how culture grows and continues.

The remarkable thing is that this conversation ignores chronology. A manuscript from the twelfth century may speak more directly to an artist today than something produced last week. A fragment of weathered paper torn from a wall in Rome may raise a question that has occupied me for years. An unknown amateur working quietly in a village a century ago may become an unexpected collaborator through something they left behind and was later collected.

Time does not prevent dialogue. Art has always found ways to cross it.

Originality is rarely the invention of something from nothing. It is the ability to hear the conversation clearly enough to contribute something that has not yet been said. The artist is neither copying the past nor rejecting it. The artist is participating.

Every artwork says, “Here is what I have discovered.” Someone decades from now may respond. Perhaps they will borrow a method. Perhaps they will challenge an assumption. Perhaps they will recognize something that I myself never understood.

The conversation continues.

Museums, libraries, and archives exist because civilization recognizes, consciously or unconsciously, that this conversation matters. Every preserved object remains available to speak again. Every collected letter. Every sketchbook. Every notebook. Every finished work. Every unfinished experiment.

They wait patiently for the next participant to arrive.

This understanding has gradually changed my own relationship to making art. I recognise that I am not competing with other artists. There is no competition in art. I am talking with them. Some have been dead for centuries. Some have not yet been born.

My responsibility is simply to speak sincerely and clearly from where I stand in this moment. Someone else will hear it. Someone will answer. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not for a hundred years. That is perfectly acceptable.

The conversation has already lasted thousands of years. It is in no hurry.

We are each given a brief opportunity to contribute a paragraph before passing the manuscript to the next generation.

That is good enough.

Please share your thoughts about how you think about the trans-temporal conversation in the comments below.

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STUFF THAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK

Most stuff happened in NOTES this past week. Mostly posting incoming works for the Visual Poetry and Color Show.

See what happened in NOTES

The Root Tongue vs. The Spectacle: Subverting the Simulation

In the first two installments, we explored how asemic overwriting converts everyday utilitarian papers into artisticly sacred relics, and how it stretches the time-based biology of how we look at art. But this practice is not just an aesthetic experiment; it is a vital act of cultural resistance in many ways.

In an era dominated by hyper-mediated digital environments, our excessive reliance on human language has become a trap. We live inside what the French theorist Guy Debord termed the Society of the Spectacle - a capitalist reality where genuine human experiences are replaced by a glossy, simulated media landscape. We are constantly bombarded by semantic messages, ads, notifications, and political propaganda designed to distract us from our own true natures. This language of the Spectacle manipulates our rational minds, turning us into predictable products and passive consumers. We are chronically confused, constantly mistaking the simulation and its messages for the Real.

Speaking the Root Tongue

When language is weaponized to sell and control, literal meaning breaks down. To fight back, the artist must step away from formalized alphabets entirely. Beneath our rigid human grammar lies the root tongue - the all-pervading, intrinsic language of the universe talking to itself in infinite multiplicity.

Our primitive human languages are clumsy, limited tools. They are prone to corruption and poorly suited to translate the vastness of this fundamental reality. They trap the intellect within a purely rational framework.

Asemic writing shifts the burden of communication away from institutional alphabets and returns it to the human body. It relies on the raw language of the hand, translating subconscious intuition directly onto the page through kinetic gesture. This somatic expression bypasses semantic gatekeeping to speak directly to and about what cannot be directly spoken - tapping into a pre-literate intelligence. It is a language we all intuitively understand deep below the surface of learned grammar.

Short-Circuiting the Transaction

Advertisers and propagandists exploit the rational mind’s ever present, evolutionary urge to decode, label, and categorize. They give us text and image, and we instinctively try to pull a transaction out of it. By presenting script that firmly, beautifully refuses to be decoded, asemic overwriting short-circuits this transactional loop.

When you look at an altered document, the unreadable mark becomes an act of concrete truth. It invites the reader to make a cognitive leap across the divide, moving away from rational intelligence and stepping fully into their intuitive intelligence. By stripping the historical document of its ability to sell, instruct, or bureaucratize, the artwork stops the machinery of the Spectacle in its tracks.

Reclaiming the Real

Ultimately, this is why the converted paper artifact becomes a relic. It is a preserved vessel of pure human presence.

• The Aura of Mystery: It mimics handwriting but refuses to reveal a specific sentence, carrying an aura of hidden knowledge under a cover of ambiguity.

• The Trace of the Hand: In a digitized world, physical mark-making leaves a permanent monument to a fleeting human moment over a dead, bureaucratic record.

• Sacred Interruption: It halts the natural decay of vernacular history, sanctifying a forgotten piece of ephemera and drawing it into the timeless realm of art.

Asemic overwriting clears a quiet, unmediated space within the digital noise. It rescues utilitarian artifacts from the trash heap of history, breaks the spell of the simulation, and invites us to look past the text, reconnect with our interior natures, and experience the raw weight of the Real.

(More about Root Tongue. Last fall I wrote a series of pieces called the Root Tongue Dust Letters. You can search for them on the homepage of the Touchonian.)

Thank you for following along with this three-part series.

Please feel free to share your thoughts, your own experiences with asemic art, or how you navigate the noise of the Spectacle in the comments below.

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STUFF THAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK

I accidentally emailed the previous article The Arts as a Unified Field. I had intended just to post it online instead of email it. Otherwise I have mostly been posting incoming works for the visual Poetry and Color Exhibition coming up August 15 in Los Alamos, NM in Notes.

I updated the Exhibition page for the Visual Poetry Show So far about 23 new pieces have come in to add to the exhibit in Los Alamos. Thank you to those who have contributed!

I am going to keep going with the once a week ‘digest’ email posts for a while to see how that works out.

See what happened in NOTES

The Arts as a Unified Field

For some time now I have been interested in what I think of as the crossover between the arts. A reader recently suggested that my Asemic Writing drawings may create a synesthetic experience. That observation made me stop and think because I do not believe what I am doing is exactly synesthesia, at least not in the neurological sense. Although that is not to say that the viewer may have such an experience.

Synesthesia is generally understood as an involuntary crossing of the senses. Someone may hear a sound and automatically perceive a color. A letter may always appear blue or a musical note may always produce the sensation of a particular shape. It is a remarkable phenomenon, but it is not quite how I work I don’t think.

My own exploration is intentional as opposed to involuntary.

I might be walking while listening to Hans Zimmer, John Adams, Steve Reich, or Igor Stravinsky. As I walk I find myself moving my hands through the air, conducting invisible gestures, imagining how those movements might later become marks on paper. I am not trying to illustrate the music. I am trying to understand its form. I am asking myself how rhythm, repetition, acceleration, pause, density, silence, and release might become visual events that express musicality.

The drawing does not represent the music. It is composed according to similar principles that I acquire through listening.

The same thing happens with collage poetry.

When I think about collage poetry, I am rarely thinking about the literal meaning of words. I collect phrases from other peoples texts that catch my attention and then arrange and rearrage them. I am thinking about cadence, ambiguity, abrupt justaposition of the phrasing, compression, openness, emphasis, repetition, interruption, and the unexpected turn. I don’t really think of them as spoken but as read. Good poetry has architecture. It unfolds through time while maintaining an internal coherence that is felt before it is analyzed.

Can a drawing possess cadence? Can a collage have meter? Can an asemic work contain alliteration without letters?

Such questions fascinate me.

Perhaps we have been separating the arts too completely. We organize them according to the senses through which they are most commonly experienced. Music belongs to hearing. Painting belongs to sight. Dance belongs to movement. Poetry belongs to language.

Yet when one begins making art, these distinctions may begin to dissolve. In my case I am always looking for the in-between states. I think that is where the creative impulse lives.

A composer speaks of texture. A painter speaks of rhythm. A poet of color. A dancer of line. The vocabulary itself begins migrating across disciplines because the underlying experience is no longer confined to the artistic discipline of a single sense.

I am looking for the deeper language from which all of the arts arise.

This relates closely to what I have elsewhere called the Root-Tongue.

The Root-Tongue is not English or Chinese or music or drawing. It is the underlying field of relationships through which the universe speak to itself and from which all expressive forms emerge. Rhythm exists before music. Gesture exists before drawing. Silence exists before poetry. Pattern before mathematics. Movement before dance.

The various arts are simply different human dialects interpreting the same original language through which the universe converses with itself.

When I make asemic drawings I often think less about writing than about conducting and composing. The hand becomes a performer responding to something that cannot yet be spoken. The page becomes a recording device whose music is visible rather than audible.

Likewise, when I listen to music I often find myself seeing gestures as I am hearing notes. Not because the music literally becomes visual, but because I am listening for its structure. I am translating one dialect of the language of art into another.

This may explain why artists so often understand one another across disciplines. A sculptor may deeply appreciate Bach. A poet may understand abstract painting. A choreographer may discover ideas in architecture. They are not borrowing subjects from one another. They are recognizing familiar principles spoken in different dialects.

Every art form is engaged in the same ancient conversation. The media differ. The senses differ. The artifacts differ. The root language beneath them remains the same.

At the Root of Things

As I continued thinking about this, I realized that perhaps I had stopped one step too soon.

I suggested that music, poetry, drawing, dance, and the other arts might all be different dialects of the same Root-Tongue. I still believe that is true, but where exactly does this Root-Tongue reside?

It cannot be located in the eye. It cannot be located in the ear. Nor in the hand.

The eye only receives light. The ear only receives vibrations. The skin responds to pressure and temperature. Each sense gathers only a fragment of the world.

Yet somehow we do not experience fragments. We experience a seamless reality.

Somewhere beyond the senses themselves there exists a synthesizing awareness that gathers these independent streams into a single coherent experience. We do not consciously assemble sight, sound, touch, memory, balance, smell, language, emotion, expectation, and imagination. They simply arrive already woven together.

Consciousness is performing an extraordinary act of composition every moment of our lives. This synthesis is so complete that we rarely notice it. Perhaps this is where the arts truly originate.

An artist does not merely paint what is seen or compose what is heard. The artist works from the already synthesized field of experience. When a composer writes music, the music carries movement, emotion, architecture, color, memory, silence, anticipation, and physical gesture. When a painter makes a drawing, the drawing contains rhythm, duration, weight, acceleration, pause, and breath. These qualities are not borrowed from another art form. They were never separate to begin with.

The separation occurs only after we begin naming the senses.

Consciousness itself is not divided into departments. The eye does not know that it is visual. The ear does not know that it is auditory. Those distinctions belong to analysis, not experience.

Before we divide the world into seeing, hearing, touching, speaking, and moving, there is simply awareness meeting the world in its wholeness.

Perhaps this explains why artists are continually crossing boundaries between disciplines. We are not importing musical ideas into drawing or poetic ideas into sculpture. We are returning upstream to the place before those distinctions existed.

It may be the natural activity of consciousness itself as it encounters reality before thought separates experience into categories.

The various arts then become different ways of revealing that original unity. Each medium makes visible one aspect of an indivisible whole. Each artwork becomes evidence that consciousness is fundamentally synthetic rather than analytic.

Creative insight comes first. Analysis begins afterward.

When we read something we are, in effect, ignoring the representational medium of language and gazing past it to extract or listen to the ideas and information the language is carrying to us.

What if this activity of reading is carried into the field of abstract art?

The Saccadic Rhythm: Why Seeing is a Time-Based Art

When we look at a page of asemic overwriting, we are immediately met with a paradox. Our brains are deeply conditioned to find patterns, decode symbols, and extract literal information. When the eye encounters a transformed historical document, it naturally tries to read. But because the marks are illegible, the typical transactional process of reading breaks down.

Instead of a passive extraction of data, the act of looking becomes a kinetic experience. By retaining language remnants - shards of letters, faint typographical lines, or isolated vowels - within the overwritten surface, the work intentionally triggers a phantom sense of reading. It encourages a state of looking that closely mimics listening to a piece of music. It forces us to recognize a fundamental truth about visual art: seeing is inherently a time-based medium.

Chronostasis: The Dance of the Moving Focal Point

This temporal engagement relies heavily on the biological reality of human vision. We often assume that our eyes take in an entire visual field all at once, like a camera capturing a single snapshot. In reality, our brains construct a complex illusion.

Physiologically, we only see with high-resolution clarity through a remarkably tiny focal point. To navigate the world, our eyes perform small, rapid, involuntary movements called saccades. We jerk from point to point, stitching the world together millisecond by millisecond. Everything outside this narrow, razor-sharp window belongs to a blurry peripheral vision.

This peripheral sight is not empty space; it gives us a general feeling of the surrounding environment. In an asemic work, your tiny focal point hunts across the page, tracking the remnants of the script. Meanwhile, your peripheral vision absorbs the blurry context of the original document - the ghost of the old ledger, the faded ink of a letter, or the formal geometry of an old form.

Seeing as Listening

By encouraging the viewer to scan fragmented, unreadable text, the work stretches the temporal experience of focused looking. You cannot consume the image in a single glance. Your eye must travel along the loops, paths, and intersections of the ink.

This journey mirrors the physical process of listening to a musical piece unfold note by note. Music requires time to exist; a chord only has meaning in relation to the silence before it and the notes after it. Similarly, the asemic line demands a slow, deliberate presence. It builds a saccadic rhythm across the page, transforming the static paper relic into a living choreography of sight through the accumulation of the image through thousands of movements of our focal point as it moves around the surface gathering this abstract information into memory.

By demanding this slow, rhythmic focus, the artwork actively resists the rapid, hyper-fast consumption of modern digital imagery. It forces the brain to slow down, grounding the viewer in the physical mechanics of their own body - their own eyes.

This was the revolution created by Braque and Picasso with the cubist image - the breakdown of the image into shards and bits and pieces that have to be acquired through time by gathering the image through the focal point in order to build the image in the memory like a musical work is appriciated through memory over time.

But this biological intervention is only the beginning. What happens when we completely step away from the rational need to decode? What language are we actually speaking, writing and reading when the alphabet dissolves entirely?

Next week, in our final installment, we will dive into the “root tongue,” look at the political philosophy of Guy Debord, and explore how unreadable marks can rescue our true nature from a simulated world.

STUFF THAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK

OK, here is the new way I am doing the subscriber newsletter. It will be more of a weekly digest or have a table of weekly contents of things that were posted but not sent as endless emails. That way you can keep and refer to the weekly emails as a way to find everything. So, unless you visit the Touchonian website on Substack frequently, here are some things you missed that happened since the last email.

See what happened in NOTES

I love hearing from you! I want to hear what is on your mind. (and not with emojis please.)

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Overwhelmed by Abundance

For the past several days I have been sorting through what I thought was a relatively small collection of paper I gathered from the walls of European cities this past spring. Posters, fragments of advertisements, weathered papers, torn typography, bits of color, accidental compositions. I had stuffed them into a few envelopes and ziplock bags and carried them home thinking, “There isn’t really that much here.”

I was wrong. As I spread everything out and began organizing it into categories, the true scale of what I had collected slowly revealed itself. Every handful became several more. Every stack became a pile. Every pile suggested hundreds of future collages.

At some point I found myself feeling something unexpected. I felt overwhelmed by the possibilities.

It struck me that this is a peculiar stage in an artist’s life. Early on we imagine that if only we had more materials, more opportunities, more ideas, more books, more time, more space, everything would become easier. It does and it doesn’t. Abundance introduces an entirely different challenge. It widens the horizons, forcing reorientation. Every sheet of paper quietly asks to become something, carrying a possibility that suggests an invisible obligation. Every beautiful fragment seems to deserve a future.

The imagination immediately begins calculating. How many works could these materials become? How many years of work are sitting here? What combinations have I not yet imagined? Will I ever reach the bottom of the pile?

Of course the answer is that I probably won’t. And that is perfectly fine. I realized that I was unconsciously assuming responsibility for the entire collection, as though I had somehow entered into an agreement to use every scrap. But there was never such an agreement.

The papers are simply waiting. Some may become collages next week. Others may wait ten years before they reveal where they belong. Some may never be used at all. Unlike a chef, a collage artist does not have to worry about things going rotten. I like to work with materials that can collect dust. In fact, most of these materials have already collected dust, survived sun, wind, rain, mold, graffiti and been buried under other layers for weeks or months before I excavated them. They have acquired character and patina. Their value is not diminished by waiting but increased by it.

Nature operates this way. A forest produces millions of seeds knowing that only a fraction will become trees. Rivers carry stones that may wait centuries before becoming smooth. Museums preserve countless objects that may spend generations in storage before someone discovers exactly why they mattered.

Abundance is not demanding immediate action. Only our anxiety makes it feel that way. Better to see these materials as a library rather than a to-do list. Libraries are not read in a single lifetime. Archives are not exhausted. Gardens are not harvested all at once. Their purpose is simply to be available when the right moment arrives. Instead of seeing an impossible mountain of future work, I can simply see tomorrow’s work - and tomorrow is a very long time…

New Publishing Program

As I sat there looking at these endless stacks of paper, it occurred to me that I have fallen into a similar trap with my writing right here on this platform. Over the course of my time on Substack, my daily studio and writing practice has generated an abundance of text - over 800 posts to date. Because the writing engine never seems to burn out, I have been broadcast-mailing these reflections multiple times a week, sometimes daily.

But just like the piles of European street papers on my desk, an abundance of content introduces an entirely different challenge. It creates an invisible obligation for the recipient. I realize that a daily email is a lot to ask of a reader’s attention, and a crowded inbox quickly turns an invitation into a to-do list. I don’t want to wear my readers out, nor do I want to force an artificial hustle onto a space meant for contemplation.

Recognizing the next right move means learning not to panic in the face of limitless possibilities. It means structuring the flow.

And by the way, to give your inbox a much-needed breather while protecting my own creative momentum, I am shifting the rhythm of this publication. Moving forward, I am consolidating our email delivery to one comprehensive, dedicated essay like this, sent once a week - maybe on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

My daily fragments of thought, raw studio sketches, typographic observations, and process notes will move entirely over to the Substack Notes feed. This adjustment keeps your email inbox clean and spacious, allowing the weekly work to breathe on its own, while offering a low-stakes, real-time space for us to interact daily without triggering a constant email alert.

The collage papers are patient, they have already waited on city walls and crossed countries folded inside luggage; they can certainly wait quietly in the studio until the right moment calls them forward. Perhaps this is another lesson that comes with a long life in the studio. Scarcity teaches us to appreciate opportunities. Abundance teaches us how to pace ourselves so we can actually inhabit them.

And our writing and reading practice can be patient, too. Instead of clogging up you inbox with textual abundance I am shifting to this weekly schedule to give you, my dear readers, enough breathing room for you to have the time to read these posts by reducing the frequency. If you want more there are many articles that I am sure you have not read or would like to read again on the Touchonian website as I mentioned in a previous post.

The work has never been to conquer all the possibilities. The work is to recognize the next single step, and answer the call when it comes.

Read on the Web for the Full Experience

This publication is built to be an active, open dialogue, not a silent broadcast. If you are reading this inside your email client, the interactive community features are clipped. Please click through to the live website layout to join the conversation. I for one would love to hear your thoughts and I will respond.

Join the Web Conversation & Leave a Comment

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Join the Conversation: When you find yourself facing an overwhelming abundance - whether it is raw material in your workspace, ideas in your head, or media in your daily life - how do you intentionally narrow your focus to just the “next right choice” without panicking? Let’s discuss in the comments.

RETROACTIVE CONTENT

Here is a new experiment. I am going back retroactively to this post after it has already been published and emailed to subscribers. Below is a link to further thoughts on how I can stay restricted to a once a week email to subscribers as more of a digest but continue to post things to the live site of The Touchonian.

I assume, if you are one of my subscribers and already have gotten this post as an email, you will find this retroactive content when you click through from your email to the website.

If you are one of these subscribers. Let me know in the comments section that you noticed this retroactive (not radioactive) content.

Hi Gang.

There are currently about 800 posts on the Touchonian. It has really become a remarkable resource. While I write on many topics and I am frequently writing experimental things, the main spine and focus of the Touchonian is the section called Creative Lifestyle.

I am working on the manuscripts for these essays to become a series of books for your studio. I have collected together all of the articles through 2025 and am organizing them into readable catagories, etc.

What I often do is search for past articles by using the search function on the homepage and type in a subject or a keyword I want to read again and the search pops up a list of related articles. I find this very helpful.

When you have time and you have a subject you are wondering about use the search feature to pull up all related articles.

Side Note

I was reorganizing some books on my books shelves and came across a book of poetry from 2012 by Alan Michael Parker for which one of my images PDP #288 created in 2005 was hired for the cover of the book by Tupelo Press.

I just thought I would share that since I am rereading that book.

I also was looking over one of my own wild and crazy poetry books called “In an Agitated Voice” which is Minimalist Visual Poetry. All of the pages are in the same vein as the cover image. It is fasinating to page through and attempt to read it. I used a process I call ‘disemvowelment’. Where I replaced the vowels with other charactors to create a visual texture. It is possible to decode it with enough effort but the original texts that I used were also put through a text randomizer to destroy the original arrangement. In one poem I used ‘The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe as found material and another piece by Anton Chekhov, etc.

Looking at the book this morning I am thinking some of my favorite pages could be blown up into large limited edition prints. That could be cool.

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North Sea Poets

We are a group of experienced poets based near the Scottish east coast. We run online masterclasses, and post here on poetry, poetics and the writing life.

From Utility to Aura: Turning Artifact into Relic

Part 1 of a series exploring how asemic overwriting rescues forgotten vernacular history from the dustbin of time.

To overwrite a document with lines that cannot be read is to perform an act of artistic alchemy. When we apply asemic writing - text that has the form of language but lacks a literal, semantic meaning - over preexisting paper artifacts, we do not simply deface them. We reface them. We transform them. This process strips a utilitarian or vernacular document of its standard - but now defunct - utility and replaces it with an intuitive, visual weight. In doing so, the mundane record dies, and the artistic relic is born.

The Deconstruction of the Vernacular

Everyday paper artifacts - century-old accounting ledgers, standard legal receipts, forgotten bureaucratic forms, or casual personal notes - were born out of utility. They are vernacular objects, created not for display, but to perform a transactional or communicative function within a specific moment in time. They carry data and enforce logic. They are of a temporary, ephemeral use.

Asemic overwriting intentionally disrupts this functional history. By layering illegible, abstract marks over the original print or script, the artist creates a definitive visual barrier.

This act of obfuscation fundamentally changes how a viewer interacts with the object. When the text can no longer be decoded, it can no longer be used as a tool. Instead, the viewer is forced to look at the structure of the writing rather than through it for the data. The object shifts instantly from a piece of practical infrastructure into a site of artistic contemplation, dissolving its utility to make room for pure creative aura.

The Architecture of the Palimpsest

It is critical to clarify that this process is not an act of erasure poetry, at least not in the sense of redaction or censorship. Censorship seeks to silence, and redaction seeks to hide; overwriting, conversely, seeks to reveal and to integrate. Rather than treating the surface as a blank slate to be wiped clean, the existing visual elements, typographical geometry, and marginalia are treated with reverence, serving as an intricate compositional guide.

By deliberately leaving visual clues to the origin of the document - especially when specific visual elements serve the final work - the piece remains anchored in historical reality. The past is not destroyed; it is collaborated with, creating a modern, psychological palimpsest. Historically, a palimpsest is a piece of parchment scraped clean and reused, leaving faint, ghostly traces of its original writing underneath. Here, the original bureaucratic or domestic layers are left completely visible beneath the new, abstract gestures.

This creates a powerful aesthetic tension between two distinct human impulses:

• The Utilitarian Layer: Represents historical structure, institutional logic, social order, and standard communication.

• The Overwritten Layer: Represents raw human intuition, subconscious gesture, and a universal language entirely free from the constraints of the laws of grammar.

The two layers bleed into one another. The rigid lines of a financial ledger, commercial receipt or the formal font of a legal document are swallowed by fluid, unreadable script, making the object feel deeply ancient yet thoroughly contemporary.

Preservation Through Transformation

A relic is an object that survives from the past, valued for its historical, spiritual, or emotional connection to human experience. Asemic overwriting infuses everyday utilitarian paper with the exact qualities that define a relic:

1. The Aura of Esoteric Wisdom: The marks mimic handwriting but refuse to reveal a specific meaning, carrying an aura of hidden knowledge that triggers a sense of profound mystery.

2. The Trace of the Hand: In a digitized world, physical mark-making emphasizes the bodily presence of the artist’s hand, leaving a permanent monument to a fleeting human moment over an old, discarded record.

3. Sacred Interruption: By interrupting the natural decay or forgotten status of a vernacular artifact with a fresh creative act, the artist sanctifies the object giving it new life in the realm of art.

Ultimately, asemic overwriting rescues utilitarian artifacts from the trash heap of history and elevates everyday vernacular paper into timeless relics of visual poetry. But once the document has been transformed into a relic, how does the human brain actually engage with it? How do we read a text that refuses to be decoded?

Next week, in Part 2, we will look at the biology of vision, the rhythm of music, and why looking at an asemic artwork is a radical act of slowing down time.