I took this picture just before Christmas. I took it with the intention of writing a blog post about measurement and the fact I need to remind myself to be shatter resistant. I moved the pan scrub in the sink to improve the composition. I only mention this as Abi had noticed me repositioning children's tissue paper on sheets I was laminating while saying " That's perfect, brilliant" to the kids. Whether this is aesthetic OCD or my Faux-Bauhaus artistic training it has always seemed important that things are positioned properly. That they hold their weight and composition.
I am not shatter resistant; I feel shattered, stretched, strung out - as Bilbo the Hobbit says, 'like butter spread too thin'. At least I remembered I had moved the pan scrub, I noticed my action and chose to ignore it. I have discovered that the moving of the pan scrub is a distraction. Someone could probably write a pointless study about where it should go and somehow link it to the new materialism through assemblage theory but you need to ask yourself why would ya and what would it do.
The RD2 is passed; I got some interesting feedback and I have a focus. The rulers in the sink were going to point towards measurement. I was going to say that the ruler is an instrument of measurement that works and changes neither what it measures or itself. The point was that having read lots of new materialism that was referencing the quantum world and quantum measurements and uncertainty principle, I wanted to try to say that on some scales a ruler is fine especially if you want to know how long a piece of string is. This is my first problem - I need to get past it.
This all seems a bit pointless today. I drank champagne on Friday to celebrate getting through my RD2 and then finished Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? this morning. I have then been reading adventure play literature about loose parts play for the rest of the day and writing an abstract for a conference in Finland. It all feels not quite right, like I'm a wannabe play-worker/academic/artist. What I want to be is an artist who is interested in thinking differently about the world as I have run out of rope to hang myself with.
I have now got to do three reminders. The first is that in What Is Philosophy chapter seven, D and G explain that art does not sit on the same plane as science or philosophy it sits in a world of sensation - the aesthetic realm. They are very clear about this and they are clear about the mind being a point where the plane of science (what can be measured and find a center through the forces that hold it) and philosophy (that which establishes concepts on an unfolding plane of immanence) and art meet. I liked this book and I think that it makes sense of things. There is a bit where they say that drugs as substances are flaky so the thinking or ideas or art that emerge from taking drugs must also be flaky. I loved this bit partly because it is so stupid and also partly because I had reached the point when I read it that I considered it to be true. In the conclusion there seems to be an intimation that they had lost their edge and even that some of the thoughts they had had were losing their coherence as if they had built something bigger than their current selves; they were old with decaying minds, only a few years from not being able to resist jumping from the open window.
Laura and Kate have asked me to start to write my literature review when I'm not under pressure. Something to share at our next supervision. The RD2 process let me know that there is an ordering at hand and for all the investment in an ontological turn there is a certain amount of stamp collecting that needs to take place. I think I have started this today I am reading some nice stuff about adventure play. I am taking a new materialist line of sight and avoiding a line of flight but I wonder what this means. I don't know why the Paul Anderson film about the dress maker was called The Phantom Thread, but that is what it feels like today - chasing a phantom. There is a scene where Daniel Day-Lewis knowingly eats the poison mushrooms his lover collects and cooks - she says, "I want you flat on your back, helpless, tender open.......you need to settle down a little." This is what it feels like today.
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