Elegy/Paen
Elegy
It all starts with education. Or, the system of education. Particularly through working or college, learning through what surrounds us now, and what we can discover of the past, helps lead us to discover who we can be into our future. Work and college learning depends heavily on where you are and the systems/ideologies that you find yourself surrounded by, and on how flexible those things are allowed to be — and the overbearing tendency in recent years has been towards constraint, in many many ways, rather than freedom.
Systems, modules, software, hardware, media, industry, assumptions, presumptions, and on and on . . . the structures that envelop education have tended towards removing the tactile, communicative aspects of teaching to be replaced with the modular, rote, art by numbers approach that puts software and industry norms and pre-established methods at the forefront of the experience of education. Or, there is none — no actual engaged, communal learning at all. Meanwhile, play, sharing, serendipity, adaptability and imagination are marginalised, if not excised completely.
These modules, lack of actual teaching (a mentoring, an enabling, gently showing the way through a wild and wonderful landscape, whether at work or in college), and the gradual, ever-closer lockstep with industry, things like awards and ‘education’ programmes, they all (and more) only end up with followers repeating the accepted state of decay, rather than inculcating that gentle, useful arrogance that causes change, shifting things onwards, creating the ever flourishing unrecognisable new.
The problem is in the system, not the people. Over time, inspiration and creativity have been undermined by usability and employability. By expectations of ‘value for money’ rather than venturing into the unknown. This is a natural outcome of the excel/admin/module nature of the design education system, the (mis)uses of data, the universitification of Art College, the removal of grants. In so many ways, this is something that diminishes the human, both educator and student. All of us.
This will all burst because it has to; why go on if the worst are always elevated while the rest are left to waste — education on a spreadsheet — joy confined — graded and sorted — another kind of blame — another other — more hordes of ‘them’ —
The system of education. By forcing people to take on things they may not need, may not naturally discover and bring to bear in their work and life, by imposing external expectations that repeat and stagnate, rather than revealing internal particularities and idiosyncrasies that enable a shift, a change of viewpoint and approach (and outcome) that moves things on, the system of education actively denies that element that is surprising, engaging, wonderful and magickal, and the state of design work ossifies. It becomes homogenised. This trickles — floods — into culture, as the desiccated education systems influence and shape wider culture. Our visual (textual, conceptual, philosophical, social, political) world becomes denuded, constrained.
Paen
Break this cycle.
It can — should — be free. Open. Probing and questioning — revealing. Inspired and inspiring.
Inspiration first, and always.
Making the new, the iconoclastic, the shocking, the confusing, the heartachingly beautiful. Finding ways, opening, unfolding. Accept the mystery, the dreaming, the play. Enter the labyrinth: detail, layers. Loving the time as it passes. Getting older. Places, stories, experience — the things people inhabit, I inhabit, you inhabit.
Thinking of the Oort Cloud. So far away. What is its shape? In what matter does it reside? Thoughtfulness and slow time. Reflection, consideration. Study, learning, understanding. The long path. Questions not easily answered. Answers that give pause, that require a response not easily given, nor lightly. Life faceted in curious regard. To immerse in fathoms dark, sounding. To veer from the ecliptic in oblique soaring. Coagulation.
Circles: trust, understanding,
(what takes us further/unexpected/imaginations art wonder magic)
Seeing.
The paramount necessity of emotion: music, the poetry of things.
Learning for the future. For what you will do.
Music not composed by an individual as external
But
Drawn out of the individual and represented by composer as internal- memory of the unmade or intuition somehow
To find the joy in the flow: the simple pleasure of discovery. To let things be or change as they ought in their own terms, without assumption or imposition. To do just enough, or not. To do the least possible. To do more than necessary. How could you know? To always be concerned with where we are going, what will be. To experience the process through the desire and need to create with intent, no matter what . . .
The desire to create- thinking, imagining, conceiving, planning, researching, producing, adapting, distributing (and so on)- coalesces many many kinds of abilities in the impetus to make something that has an effect: that causes a change.
an outlier, an explorer, bringing things back in from the world
Establish leading (laughter) through change art wonder magick again from education onwards and on the alchemical the baroque the hidden and the lost and all the yet to be known.
what takes us further/
unexpected/imagination
Colours and sounds and shapes and spaces and ways things combine, unfold, enfold. Atmosphere. A particular sensibility. Allowing the transcendent.
why not a different/other world?
