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Thursday, November 03, 2005

Why Give Ideas A Form?


I realize that this is what makes me an artist - instead of purely an intellectual. In Dialogue we like to find out our assumptions. This seems to be one of my core operanting assumptions.

Articulating an idea's practical manifestation seems to be important to me, as if finding the "proof" of an idea would be to a scientist. I regard talking about something to be just the first part of that. Thus, I'm writing this down rather than purely talking about it. I'm concerned that an idea can stop at talk and be lost. I want ideas to go farther into being something more real - more expressed.

Sometimes people misunderstand when they hear me being too surface or too literal in the way I talk. People who like ideas often don't get why I think it's so important to be practical and literal. I often talk about examples in the form of the teensy manifestations rather than the big extremes that most people use. I don't like implied opposing extremes because the world rarely presents choices in black and white.

For me, unless the "talking" is actually "walking" in some form, however miniscule, it's not enough to just say it. I imagine that the idea must have a discipline, a practice, an expression, an art to make the ideas & intentions, etc. come into being. For me, an idea isn't all the way real until it's a book, a painting, a poem, a movement, a dialogue, etc. These, of course, can be taken to various levels of actualization.

My experience with practicality and it's expressions are different from other people's, because I see complex principles in my basic, simple actions that other people don't know about. To them simple actions don't have these cosmic expanded meanings that they do for me - mostly because they don't practice Alexander Technique. For me, almost any simple physical choice of how to move is a microcosm of expressing powerful, potential phenomenal change. To most other people, moving it's just a stupid automatic thing that they don't think much about.

In my past I hung out with a few people who never did anything but talk about what they could do or planned to do or might do. I also saw myself talking without doing anything and it distressed me. So I became disillusioned that talk maybe is a way of dissipating energy or entertaining oneself rather than the first part of moving, creating, planning or preparation. That's why when I talk, I try to talk about what actual manifestations are real for me directly. What is really present in experience gives the best examples. People experience, but they don't think about much of what their experience means and how they can use it in other situations. It seems that most people haven't experienced these common situations the way I do - or at least, they're not motivated to write about them as I am.

For me the practical outer leads directly to the inner states. It's one of my assumptions that I hold so dear that I can't imagine other people might not share recognition of it's importance. So for me to "evoke" a state, I find that it works better for me to "do something" physical to get a goal - as opposed to thinking or talking. That doing can be to "do nothing" so something new can happen. For me the doing of something is a means to express the intention directly; without the practical, physical doing part the intention is easily lost. Lost because it's been interrupted by not being carried into action.