Bear with me here for a moment. I swear this has a point.
I concern my family with my drinking habits. Primarily because they don’t drink— and I do. Well, they don’t drink any more. That’s important. My mother especially has forgotten what it’s like to be tipsy, let alone drunk. It was never really her thing any way. In one of the rare times my mother admits she has not always been a grey haired woman insistent on persistently and unflaggingly acting her age, she gave me some advice, “You know you’re drunk when you look at yourself in the mirror and don’t know who you are.”
I’ve told that line to a couple of people before and they just look at me strangely. That’s ok. I’m used to it. But seriously, stop and think about that for a minute. Hasn’t everyone reached a point at a party where they stumble into a bathroom, do their business, then stagger to the sink, and, for a split second, look into the face of a leering, bleary eyed stranger? …no? Just me and Shelly Shelly?
My brain hurts trying to read “Stitch Bitch” but at the same time, I profoundly agree with the gloss of her ideas. Her commentary on the body is especially interesting.
Its public image, its face is a collage of stories, borrowed images, superstitions, fantasies. We have no idea what it “really” looks like
We are really an amalgamation of perceptions, constantly receiving feed back of all kinds from our surroundings and we use those to form assumptions about who we are. So, sometimes I feel like when we reach that state of drunkenness, when we don’t recognize that person in the mirror, we’re seeing a version of our self stripped of the layers of meaning we have assigned to our Self. Of course, this feeling is gone in an instant as you boozily trip your way back to the keg, and in the retelling of it, sober, and writing a mandated blog, you sound like that douchebag from your Philosophy 101 class. Precieved sincerity, like the feeling, is brief.
I also feel like we can take this floundering grasp of what is real and apply that to the way we look at art. I would argue to a certain extent that all art is realism. Each painting, sculpture, mixed media collage, etc represents a very real desire of the artist. Now, what that desire is could be something very surreal, or it could be to present something hyperreal. In the case of Shelly Jackson–or Shelly Shelly she desires a strong hard look at why we confine ourselves to linear communication. Yes, at one time, and still to a certain extent, it is is more convenient. If I ask you to please pass the salt, and you say “Rover!” I might think you had some kind of neurological infarction. Then again, you might have felt like I was barking an order at you, which made you think about dogs, which then made you think of your own dog, Rover, who OH MY GOSH YOU LEFT HIM OUTSIDE AND IT IS POURING DOWN RAIN!!!!! See– a totally linear, non-linear conversation.
Our advances in interactive media have afforded us more opportunities for this linear, non-linear communication. While the Rover example is especially simplistic, Shelly (Shelly) Jackson argues for whole stories based on this kind of movement. I think it would be interesting to have a crowd sourced hypertext, where one individual starts a story, but then others can take aspects of that story and branch off telling their own. A person could spend hours following each branch, or adding their own as they saw fit. A never ending story indeed.