They're making us write "about" pages

I am halfway through the final intensive weekend of the Creative Work course: branding, web presence, identity. How do you represent yourself?

For me, a challenge, since the question of how I represent myself, lacking the tools to do so, bound by the dread of spectral punishments, is kind of the whole problem of my life and therefore my art.

Despite this, it is of course madly fun to pick out colours and fonts and textures and collectively critique other people's websites. Design I like.

I am trying not to overthink the process of belatedly announcing my existence to the world, but overthinking is definitely a part of my brand. Freighting with excess symbolic import. Etc.

We aren't at all being taught creepy branding -- it's much better than that, more sensible and happier and useful, very much about trying to create a genuine representation of yourself. Using your own voice. Taking your own approach.

It's just. See above.

In the workshop, I couldn't come up with anything for my About page, because I couldn't imagine how to say anything re: myself that was both genuine and anything like what you might find on an About page.

Tell your story, the instructions said. You would think I could do that.

After the day of work, in a colour fugue, I went to the Bay and bought two half-priced yet still over-priced shirts in my favorite red-orange (one shiny corduroy and the other paisley with those cuffs that turn up a different colour. Lovely.)

Then I went by the new location of Russell Books, which is perfect except that it hasn't got a coffee shop inside. I could only stay a few minutes because my bus was due, though of course my bus was late, because my bus is always late. On the walk from my stop to my door, something began to take shape in my head, something about story and storylessness.

So this is my first draft. I see that it isn't at all suitable, but it is more or less true.

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About

I am making things that try to make a world and a body. Some of these things are made of language, some of colour, and some of time, and some from a combination, but all of that is just the mold that holds the shape. The shape, or flow, or change, is what matters.

However

A lot of the time I'm just doodling or writing poems about mice.

Nevertheless

I think of the process of embodiment as a work of poetics and of art.

Embodiment: the organization of unsorted sensation into something that feels, to itself, like a being. A human being, ideally, but I'm not fussy.

A jellyfish would do, or an octopus, something radial and strange, whose shape is both defined and mutable.

Poetics: the rules by which such sorting takes place.

Furthermore

I am trying to build a circuit or circulatory system for love.

I seem to be a love poet. This is embarrassing, so I am trying to find a way to approach ethics through unrequited love to make the whole enterprise seem less wasteful and self-indulgent.

What's in it for you?

I hope to create experiences (for myself and for others) that open the space for joy, transformation, recognition, and play. Maybe that sounds fun to you.

Storylessness

I'm supposed to tell you my story. Occasionally things have happened to me or near me, or even because of me, yet often I feel storyless.

The problem might be something like this: to have a story you need a person. To have a person you need a body. To have a body you need a mirror. If there was no mirror, what can you make instead?


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{rf}

1. I will maybe just say that this non-story is a non-story about personhood, not about stories per se, and that I too can envision a very satisfying work of fiction with a rake or a hologrammatic nematode as the main character.