event horizon

infinitely dense content overload resulting in a near-brain implosion
thank you internets.

copy-cat

i make things that look like things that other people make
i am an artist
i am inspired
but i am also a trembling fake
what would it look like if I was not among the rest?
would i be uninspired and irrelevant
or would i be at my very best?

not the brilliance of a thousand slivers

not the brilliance of a thousand slivers
of silver and gold
of bright things and bold,
not the last rose
in it's loneliest pose,
with its bittersweet poise,
making its covetous noise
could take my eyes off of you.  

big hearts or bust

Why is it that having a big heart is what always gets me into the most trouble?

So counter-intuitive.

Build, Break, Bloom: Some Very Unorganized Thoughts About Architecture

(Written weeks ago)

Contingency itself is the only condition of life and all things in existence pivot around a point of contingency. I am contingent. You are contingent. Life is contingent.

Time and space are the constants under which we manipulate our reality and define things. Our physical environment sits unassumingly as the culprit of Apollonian violence. Quite literally, architecture is the pinnacle of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle. The violence is unbearable sometimes. Existing within a vacancy of meaning while warped by a Dionysian chaos, this time-space experiment remains defined by mathematical boundaries, points and lines. Mastery of it is elusive in the sense that ‘truths’ are only as figured out as we determine them to be. It is only through formal manipulation that we build upon contingencies and thus assign definition and form.

Architecture, as a formal act of construction, is the wildest form of creative destruction, as well as the most tangible expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle. As you build you are systemically assaulting nature and assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless. In the process of building you are destroying all else. Physically you destroy and create while conceptually you are deconstructing the definition of what it means to be and to dwell at one point in time and space. By virtue of its process, the language of architecture is an attempt to control chaos and grant form to the formless.

The beauty that is Baba.

March 01, 1957.

The day Souhail Khalil Issa was brought into the world. My Baba. My Daddy.

I got my middle name from him. I also got a lot of my good looks from him. My hands-on attitude and wild love for exploration. Digging through the dirt, building and assembling, seeing and fixing, it's all from my Baba. My unassuming curiosity that leads me to try new things, I know it's also from him. My technical mannerisms, and my even more technical mind. In a strange way, even the creativity somehow stems from this man of practicality and simplicity.

With the good always comes some bad, and I certainly get my fair share of imperfection from him. The temper is my Baba. The feisty attitude, that is my Baba. But even those imperfections are what make the good so good. I get from him my ability to let it all go, to move the soul onwards and upwards, towards better things.

That is the beauty that is my Baba.

He's taught me to become infused with all that is meaningful, beautiful, and valuable in the world - to have the courage to know when it has all run it's course and the strength to know how to let it all go.

He is gracious and kind. A man who even if he wanted, wouldn't know how to use the word "no". He would never turn his back on the people he loves and never refuses a single friend. Even a stranger on the side of the road, he will go above and beyond to help. He always greets the world with a smile so big, no matter what he's been through. He is a man with enough heart that if captured and let out to sea, could overflow the oceans from here to India.

My father is an amazing person. A beautiful human being inside and out. He has so much love to give to the world, and like me, he also doesn't always know what to do with that love. It is in his imperfections that he is one of the most incredible people I have ever known. Not only because he is my father, and to whom I owe my life. But he has the ability to live his life with strength and courage, never letting the ups and downs of the external world change how much love he is willing to give back.

greatness of friendship

I would rather have the greatness of your friendship for as long as humanly possible, than the sweetness of a single moment of passion, which I fear would last only as long as emotionally possible.

Sadness

Can we be blessed with sadness?

Sadness, like all other things, is a state of mind. It's a place that we, ourselves, place who we are and who we think we should be, within. It's a place. It's a stage. I might be blessed with sadness only so far as it inspires me to create. Only so far as it moves me to progress as an individual who strives to master her own existence. I can manipulate that which I think is sadness, or those things that I believe to be sadness, but sadness has no inherent goodness or badness, it's just a state of mind that really, in the end, means absolutely nothing at all.

So, no. No Matthew. I am not blessed with sadness. I don't see it in that way, at least. In my own peculiar little world, sadness is the cessation of a struggle; the struggle is for a doomed-happiness, which I will never deny myself. The struggle to be real with myself and to be truthful to who I am. That is what you lose when you wallow and dwell in sadness. Like all other states of mind, sadness is just a human creation, a construct that which we bury our true selves under. Just as easily as I can create it, I can destroy it (realizing that it is slightly more difficult to destroy).

(Thanks to Matt Stangle, for inspiring me and succeeding, yet again, in distracting me from the "real" things I should be doing like studying for class and writing a paper on NAFTA...)

Language is war.

It is impossible to truly understand what another person is ever saying. Impossible to figure out another's concept or perspective born in their mind. It is impossible because no matter what we do and how we try, the only way for us as humans with cognitive activity, to learn, is through language. Through asking questions and attaching meaning to words (which will invariably be diverse and distinct in different minds), we taint the original meaning of words, of messages, of statements. The only thing that is guaranteed is that we humans will interpret things as we see fit, and in this process we will build and destroy. Language is war. Language is a problem. The question is now, how do we live with language?

Agreement in dialogue is technical. More than anything else it is technical. Agreement comes when my use of a set of terms and my chosen vocabulary reflects and triggers in your mind, the same associations by which you linked your original thought. That original thought you probably expressed using a different set of terms, different adjectives and subjects and verbs. Unique to you. Not until we have exhausted our ways of conversation, not until we find a point where I can say what I want and how I perceive what we are discussing to exist, and when that expression of my perception through careful use of language aligns with the idea in your mind, not until then, have we met agreement. Again, which can only occur when the words I have chosen to use to explain myself, happen to mean either the same or relatively the same things to you, in your mind, as you know and use them. And neither of us will ever know the true discord in existence, that lies between the shadows of our words, since we cannot feel it, since we strive for agreement, for peace. We will never really know how different our thoughts really are because we will always be striving to be in harmony. This duality is deadly but beautiful.

I recognize in this process that language and meaning is also always recycled. Social relation and communicative activity encourages the development of meaning by relying on other meaning. This is not important to me here.

It seems the only way for us humans to overcome this "problem" of language, to ever really see eye-to-eye, to ever truly see one thing from the exact same place in space and time, is to not speak. To not communicate. To not question. To not articulate. It is in translation that words will always lose their meaning, their associations, their histories. As we assign them meaning relative to ourselves, we destroy what they meant to another. As they pass from ones lips to another's ears, they morph into something new. That is why we as the carriers of the meanings of our words, are the ones to blame for the consequences.

True peace is silence. Pure peace is blackness and emptiness. Might as well be dead. If language is conflict, I don't ever want to be peaceful. Bring on the heartache.

Poaceae

"Work in progress"
All living things grow. Like Poaceae, there are points in life where you just have to diverge from the stem and go in your own direction - but luckily you can always turn around and find your way home on the path from which you came.


Node: The point along a stem which gives rise to leaves, branches, or inflorescences.

L is for the way you look, to me.

"There is no perfect love" I heard that somewhere today.

Nothing on earth is perfect- everything is imperfect. When I create something i do so to the extent that I believe it in itself is perfect, it is the most perfect it can be. I realize imperfections do exist and to all other eyes anything that passes through my hands is flawed or can be - but to me it is the intent of putting together the piece in all of its beauty and glory and having it complete that makes it so perfect.

It can grow old, yes. It can lose color, yes. It can become modified, yes. It is vulnerable and helpless and cannot withstand even the slightest bit of an earthquake...yes.

It can even disappear, but it will never cease to exist in my imagination and that is why it is oh so perfect to me.

To Play or Not To Play, Is the Question

there is nothing or no one telling you what to do, it's all up to you.

vibrato or no vibrato, you decide.

so the right answer? the most accurate decision?
it's what you make it to be,
there's no external influence, no 3rd party involved.
it's just you
the bow
and C-G-D-A.

the most beautiful move is the one that you want.
it's what you feel.
it's what you know.

that's what music is, it's what we know to be true to us, every step of the way.
it's a variable expression of who we are, ever changing and always in harmony with us.
because we picked the notes, the pitch, the arrangements.
it's our baby.

you give a song life, and just as easily,
you take that life away.

it's not arbitrary, it's completely planned out.
it's mapped out for us in our past, our histories, the places we've been, the people we've met.
the music we make, the sounds that are each individually worthless but yet together so purposeful and necessary.

it's what you want and no matter how hard you try, you can't get rid of what you want.

it always finds a way to creep back up into your life and scare the living shit out of you.

Finally!

I am writing again. And it feels oh-so-so-so good.

guh pie lee gor

the moon's beam and ground plane are not my friends tonite.
i look up only to look down, it seems.

i cant see you anymore, you're hiding behind anguish.
i cant feel you anymore, you're inching farther away every moment
i can't hear you anymore, my sadness gets louder every passing second.
i can't touch you anymore, my hands sting you too much.
i can't trust you anymore, for you say one thing and do another.
i can't want you anymore, you're not worth the rejection.
i can't yearn for you anymore, my heart's yearning for something new.
i can't try anymore, i'm losing my grip, my mind and my soul.
i can't wait for you anymore, I don't think you're ever coming.
i can't love you anymore, you don't love me like you did once before.

Architectural Woes

you can't fight for too long, eventually you'll realize that you're fighting yourself.
a mission to create something from within, although we don't yet know quite how to, we try.
and try.
a challenge to refute what is known,
what is right,
what is wrong,
and just follow when our minds want to succumb to our intuition.
not to neglect our intuition and stay true while maintaing a clear direction
and not distorting our intentions.

i cry through this object,
to you.
for you see,
all i have is merely the materials and tools in front of me
(that i can barely control)
to tell you how i feel.
to tell you what i think.
to change your mind.
to humbly make sense of a chaos
chaos that exists within an intangible and elite world of intellectual pervasiveness.

i'm telling you how i'm hurting.
i'm feeding you my depression.
i'm filling the deep void.

you have no idea what i'm talking about.

this wall is here.
this wood is bent.
i'm encompassing your body, i'm opening you up to the sky,
for that is what i am here to do.

this is my language.
this is the dialogue between me and the world.
this is my mind and soul
spewed out into bits
beautifully arranged into clouds that are merely made up of
air
and water.
and like water,
eventually it all evaporates into nothing