art

Day 1758, same old.

Day's pictures, Poetry

Fifteen years ago I moved to Norway, and though I easily adept wherever you drop me, I have no problems with living here, for all these years. There are a few things that I miss, Norway is more paternalistic, Holland is more liberal. I don’t drink much alcohol but you can not buy it here after eight o’clock, and hard liquor is only available I a few stores. They probable have their reasons but as a grownup man I want to decide myself if and when I buy my alcohol. It’s just an example, but it shows a mentality.

The thing is, when I am in Holland visiting family, and eating the food I missed, or doing other things I can’t do in Norway, the pleasure is there when I finally have the chance, but it also feels that it was only yesterday that I did these things. It’s the same with family, you know them so well that 1 or 2 years away can’t erase the years you spend together. Time is a strange thing, it feels like life is put on pause in Holland when I hop in a plane back to Norway, and it gets unpaused when I am back in Holland.

Maybe it has something to do with me and how I stand in life, the memories of all the things I have done in the past are often enough for me, these memories are a good substitute for any cravings I have. My girlfriend sometimes misses things more than I do, she wanted to live in a city again, for example. One of my arguments against it was that I have lived in cities. I have had that experience, she did to. If we would go back we would just pick up where we where before, and it would not feel refreshing, and new.

If you want to go back to a place where you where before, reality will start where the mundane life you had there, was paused when you left, and not at the “idealized idea” of what life was back then. We live close to a city again, and though I don’t really mind, I drive again over the same roads I have driven over for many years, years ago.

The inspiration for today cam from Day 1403.

There

are many islands

I

will never see

~

but

I have been

on one

so

I know

how it feels

Day 1757, school of life.

Day's pictures, Poetry

As a carpenter, I sometimes have apprentices. As a teacher I have to try to imagine what they are going to do, so I can stop them when they might cut their finger in two instead of the peace of wood. I have to look at their movements and expressions in the face, is it showing doubt, or confidence? They can both be dangerous.

Outside of these kinds of teacher vs student situations, we also like to “imagine” the movements of the people we meet and live with. We are specially interested in the movements of their thoughts, and like to predict them, and why they do the things they do. The problem is that we don’t like to be judged like a student when we talk with the people we meet and/or care about. There are of course all kinds of signals that can lead the astute observer to predict what the other thinks or is going to do. Just read stories about con artists and their ability to “read” people. But it is not polite to do it, at-least not to much.

The biggest problem we face while we interpret the other, is our own lack of objectivity. When I tell my apprentice not to put their finger at this or that place, and I see their finger starting to move their, I can intervene. I know from my own objective experience that your finger wants to go there, but you have to resist that urge, that’s what I have to teach the apprentice, and I can do this objectively. When they are young they will often complain and tell me that they know that, but their body language tells different, and to protect their fingers I have to insist and tell them that they are wrong.

As a teacher you have, most of the time, more knowledge, and because of this you can “predict” what your apprentice is going to do. The problem is that there are no teachers in life, or living. We are all apprentices, and as such it is difficult to maintain a healthy teacher vs student relation with anybody when the thing you have to learn is…living. There are many people that have really good ideas about life, and they can be worth it to be studied and taken serious. But good advice is not life, even Gandhi had horrible idea’s, and mother Teresa is also no saint in all regards.

Life is a project we are all working on in our own pace, and we will meet a lot of people that know a shortcut to finish life’s project, but look around, and look at the state of the world. It is better then before but there was never and is not now, someone that has finished “project life”…without cutting their fingers.

Today writing was inspired by a poem I wrote for Day 1400

I don’t think

there is anyone

that knows

what you see

~

but it is

in our nature

to imagine

Day 1756, flat.

Day's pictures, Poetry

An empty mind

makes nice echo’s

This is a poem I wrote on Day 1396, January last year.

An empty mind

makes nice echo’s

This is a poem I wrote on Day 1396, January last year.

I have always had an interest in conspiracy theories. I remember reading books from Däniken, about aliens, and I also bought books about other kinds of conspiracies, more general. I was in my early twenties and it was kind of exiting reading about things where no one talks about. This was all before the internet became a big thing, so it was not possible for me to get sucked in, on a downwards spiral, on you tube. I soon started seeing all kinds of inconsistencies, and started reading books that debunked a lot of these strange, but interesting, and exiting idea’s.

The strange thing is that I was still young, and knew little about the world around me. I still had to learn a lot about politics, society, history and so on. So my world view was still kind of empty, but when I read these conspiracy books I enjoyed shoving it in the face of my empty worldview. I think I just liked to “shove it” into something, like young people often do. It is also the way these stories are told, there is a constant undertone of hidden secrets and powers. These hidden powers control the world, a world that I just started to learn, but more important, still didn’t.

That was my small laps into insanity, but it is useful, I have my own experience, though it is 28 years ago, so I don’t know how reliable my memory is of that time. As I said before, I am still interested in conspiracy theories, and specially the mindset of people that believe these idea’s. Last year I watched a lot of you tube video’s about people that debunk flat earth believes. There is an overwhelming mount of evidence that the world is round, but there are thousands of people that believe otherwise. I have to tel one story, because it is still with me. They asked a flat earther why he didn’t hop on a bout and sailed to the edge to take some pictures, as proof that the earth is flat. He said that they patrol the seas to stop this from happening. The interviewer then calculated that you need around 50.000 boats to stop anyone from entering the “forbidden” zone. You have to man these boats in shifts, they have to be maintained and build, millions of people have to be involved in that task…why has no one ever talked about this secret project? It is ridicules of course, but we people like to make our little tree houses to play and hide in, and as long as we keep our knowledge of the world as minimal as possible, we make sure we have enough room for loud voices to fill that empty dome.

Day 1755, art.

Day's pictures, Poetry

I like going to modern art museums. I like to go, because of it’s popularity, it’s most of the time nice and quiet to walk around. I walk around in other buildings to, looking at the details of it’s architecture and other details. But walking in a public building like that feels often awkward, that’s why I like to go to a museum. In a museum I can walk around, enjoy my surrounding, without feeling out of place.

I put meaning in my pictures, when I write a poem based on it, but I never take a picture with a particular poem in mind. I just take pictures, and surprise myself later. My girlfriend starts with a more elaborate plan when she makes her paintings, that’s another way to approach it. I never thought deep about why there are these different approaches, my first guess is, that it has to do with how our brains are wired. Another reason can be that I never learned how to take pictures, I know all the technical details, but a technically bad picture can still be good. Other photographers know more about light en moods and how to manipulate their gear to the fullest, and repeat that process. These are the kind of artist that plan their photo shoots, and they get at least a technically superior picture.

You see these different approaches in art museums to, blobs of colorful paint, detailed depictions of reality or beautifully made sculptures of nothings. I always look at them as beautiful accidents, like I take my pictures. I am always amazed when people tell all kinds of stories about the meaning of some of the details, the combination of colors, and why the artist did this or that. I personally think that if an artist has something to say with their art it should be “readable” with maybe some explanation, for everyone. If you have to tell what it means, then you should just tel people what you mean without wasting a canvas and paint.

I know that this is not fair. I read philosophy books that need some prior knowledge, and otherwise a lot of explanation. Maybe I miss that knowledge, regarding some of the modern art, to appreciate it in it’s fullest. But I don’t go to art museums to learn, I just enjoy the surrounding, the quietness and the architecture is often beautiful (and hopefully without meaning). And what’s hanging on the wall, can please the visual cortex to, and that’s a bonus.

The poem that inspired me today is from Day 1375.

Modern art

seen

as a reflection

of life

is difficult

to understand

if you look at it

from the wrong

angle

Day 696, Art makes the thinker’s heart heavy.

Day's pictures, Human all too human

Day 696-1

The winter is not gone yet, the snow comes and goes but the ground is still frozen. Maybe 2 more moths ore a bit longer.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human all too human

153
Art makes the thinker’s heart heavy. – How strong the metaphysical need is, and how hard nature makes it to bid it a final farewell, can be seen from the fact that even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything metaphysical the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings, which have long been silent or indeed snapped apart, vibrating in sympathy; so it can happen, for example, that a passage in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will make him feel he is hovering above the earth in a dome of stars with the dream of immortality in his heart: all the stars seem to glitter around him and the earth seems to sink farther and farther away. – If he becomes aware of being in this condition he feels a profound stab in the heart and sighs for the man who will lead him back to his lost love, whether she be called religion or metaphysics. It is in such moments that his intellectual probity is put to the test.

Day 629, about art.

Day's pictures

Day 629-1

I have a pipe in my office and I took a picture of it. I like taking pictures of ordinary things. In this case I played around with the original picture till this came to me. I normally don’t know where I go when I manipulate pictures, I follow some routines, go there, ctrl-z and at some point, it’s there. Most of the time I really like what I made but only time will tell if I was deceived.

Rant: I also don’t like to control my appreciation for someone else’s art or pictures. But I draw the line if I don’t know if that fire extinguisher on the wall is part of the exhibition or is there by law. That is the kind of art that needs a lot of words to explain and therefore is no longer art. Visual art for me is something that fits like a puzzle in your mind and its only role is to please and  to let you appreciate the craftsmanship. Leave the stories to the story tellers and philosophy to the philosophers. Artist are the biggest liars because they can delve into the deepest well of imagination and ask of us to decipher their brains exhausts. Pretentious art is not for me, showing your deepest fear is like telling me about your pain when all you did was growing up in our comfortable society, we have to invent our pain these days, its fake. And finally watermarking your photography is the ultimate pretense, there is no originality anymore so don’t pretend you are and if money is the reason for life, I’m sorry for you.