Secrets

One of Those Things

Since I was very young people have told me their most private, personal secrets. It started out simple enough, friends telling me about secret crushes and other desires. But, that has since escalated to extremely sensitive personal information.

What is concerning is that this information comes to me unsolicited. I do not ask to know these things. In fact, I sometimes wish I could completely forget them. I think, somehow, people can sense that fact--that I cannot, in good conscience, break a trust.

People confess their darkest, most troubling secrets, the kind you only could imagine were true, and that the confessor wishes to somehow erase. It leaves me in vulnerable spot, to be certain. I cannot betray those trusts, nor can I ease the sorrow a secret may cause. It seems I can only bear witness and keep my own.

"The neighbours began to form mutual alliances(1), wishing neither to do nor suffer violence among themselves. They appealed on behalf of their children and womenfolk, pointing out with gestures and inarticulate cries that it is right for everyone to pity the weak. It was not possible to achieve perfect unity of purpose. Yet a substantial majority kept faith honestly. Otherwise the entire human race would have been wiped out there and then instead of being propagated, generation after generation, down to the present day."

Lucretius
from "On the Nature of the Universe"
trans. R. E. Latham, 1951, revised by John Godwin, 1994.

1. "mutual alliances" apparently refers to the social contract outlined by Plato in "Republic" and is the opposite of Cicero's idea of inborn justice from "On Duties".

This is not Lucretius at his poetic best, but Plato would have preferred it that way.

Influence

Fluid seeps in from all around. The influx of other peoples' conscious and unconscious thoughts and theories are what make up one layer of my intellect. I accept that. I reject that. Somewhere in between I find that "original" is not a word one can use.

I was innocently working on my final term paper when I stumbled across mentions of Baudrillard. Now, in my four years at Emily Carr I have never read much of his writing. I've read reams of other stuff--Foucault, Nancy, Kristeva, Barthes etc. Perhaps all these ladies and gentlemen have filtered into me, little bits of Deleuze crop up now and then, scraps of old Stuart Hall from my sociology days. But when Baudrillard was presented to me in a book by Arthur Kroker (Poli-Sci Prof at Concordia) titled "The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern" as a Lucretian (!) I felt a lot of things come together. Things also atomised at the same time. I think its a Lucretian thing.

Kroker from page 61.
"Not primitivism as a past long exterminated by the triumph of the rationalist totality, but as the actual destiny of the code: that is, the seduction of loss, excess and discharge, 'the necessity of lack,' as the inevitable, because so fascinating, point of imminent reversability of the law of value."

The aspirations of society up until recently have been to push the project as far as it could go. That the revolutions and technological innovations of the human "genius " have been only leading to a promised land of superiority without the realisation that the first people to use fire could have told us: you may get burned. They conquered theirfear by having to face it , but did not lose their respect for the volatility of elements.

After the French and Russian revolution it would seem that traits such as respect and dignity became equated with the absurdities of the aristocracies and therefore rejected in favour of a forthright rationalism that led to different sorts of debasements, other genocides. The point being on both sides of those histories basic laws of fate were excised. The will was believed capable of anything. Descartes will always have to answer dearly for pulling us out of our intuitions and making us believe that we could be in control all the time.

I named this blog after the idea and natural phenomena of abyssal trenches. Those are fissures in the earth at the ultimate bottom of the ocean floor. I liked they idea of whole canyons and mountain ranges beneath the ocean, hardly ever seen by human eyes.

I've enjoyed the hard sci-fi of Peter Watts. His novels "Starfish" and "Maelstrom" explore a fictive world of post-apocalyptic proportions mainly taking place at the bottom of the ocean around and underwater power station called "Beebe"

Other than that I've been fascinated by marine life since I was little. Recently, I have returned to that interest as a metaphor for the sub- and unconscious worlds of the human imagination. These conceptions have been informing my practice as an artist on and off for the last 4 years.