Whimsy widening perspectives
on making room for the wisdom of crocheted stuffies
As many of you know, I tend two columns on Substack - the other is Dear Mercury - an unusual advice column where the answers come from the wisdom of the more than human world around us. From what I can tell, this written performance project might be the only one of its kind (at least at the moment) and has now been rolling along for three years.
I love this image here because it demonstrates - in a most whimsical fashion - the manner in which I meet the more than human world with great seriousness in my practice. The knowledge of stuffed, crocheted animals made with earthly materials might not be the same as what one graduates with from school, but it is all the more reason to be curious about it. If knowledge can be embodied, then all forms something have to teach. Can I imagine into what this reindeer might ‘know’ who is beholding me? If a couch can ‘know’ something, what might it have to say? When human knowledge is placed at eye level with that of the pre-existing narratives embedded in materials or in an environment, things begin feel more collaborative and thus generative.
As an experiment, the next time someone asks you where you live, rather than answering with the name of a city or region, what if the first location that came to mind was this planet? A place where human beings are actually a small part (but having a outsized impact)? Outnumbering human beings living on the planet today are grains of sand on every shore, plants covering the surface of every continent, insects and the human and more than human ancestors who - in their deaths - have had their bodies recomposed through the genius of the planet itself. How might this shift in perspective impact how and who and what you make work about and for?
In Buddhist philosophy there is something called the Law of Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda) that describes how the existence of all phenomena depend upon causes and conditions that allow them to take form and that allow them to change form so something new can come to be. This is another way of pointing to how everything is interconnected. How would your methods of writing or making shift knowing that something as humble as the metal of your housekeys could be - in part - made from the recomposed body of someone’s ancestor buried in another place and time long ago? How would you hold the keys in your hand? Could you ever lose them again? How would you eat with wooden chopsticks from trees nourished in part by the lifeblood of animals? I live with this understanding in all of its vivid, haunting and heartful glory hour by hour, day by day.
In keeping with my understanding that the origins of my being are dependent on so many places and beings, beginning this year, I’ll be following bell hooks example and using lowercase letters for my name. I want to communicate my belief that what can be revealed to and through the life and work of an artist is of more importance than the identity of the artist as a kind of brand that can be capitalized upon. I have no idea why it took me so long to start doing this, but there ya go. Another way of living at eye-level with everything else.
whimsically yours,
i