About Technology:
I go to the grocery store to buy an apple. Big apples, glowing red in color, so glossy I can see my reflection in their skin, await my consumption... These little nuggets of human engineered wonder in no way resemble or taste like the beautifully misshapen, heterogenous, often partially eaten by ants, arguably more nutritious apples, I grew up picking. However, I am easily seduced by the glistening dreams of perfection, my primal desires of hunger and sensorial sensuality kick into gear, and leave me aloof to my hunger, the conditions of the farmer or soil, let alone the illusions they are feeding.
Symmetry, luster, and other visual clues can be evolutionarily indicative of health, quality, and reproductive abilities. Culturally, we have let this power play on aesthetics override the underlying and most important facets: the nutrition behind the apple, the nutrition it will provide me with, and quality of life and lives it has, does, and will continue to impact throughout its life cycle.
Similarly, when I go to the Apple store to buy a product, I am serenaded by beautifully designed objects. They feel good, they sound good, if they were edible, I’d probably eat them. I’ve even been told they will make my life more “efficient,” more “advanced,” and more “connected.” However, I do not see the process that went into making the phone. I do not see the rare earth elements or minerals mined, the degradation of the food, and air, and water we ultimately rely on. I do not see the Chinese or unregulated African miners who used their hands (yes hands, as in hands working with rocks) to begin this highly industrialized supply chain process. I do not see the oil it has already taken and will continue to take and I do not see its history of conflict infested borders, of pain, of destruction, and of lack of concern. I don’t even see its history of human ingenuity, or collaboration, or economic growth. I see phones, smoother than babies bottoms, in carefully chosen colors more saturated than rainbows, screaming out unapologetically something so seductive that I forget it came from someone, something, that it could possibly have an impact that would be negative, that part of the atoms that make up its very existence, that I am currently placing my fingers on to write this, that you are currently using your eyes to read this, came from Africa, or China, or mercury, or rocks. And, on some level we are interacting with this, just as much as we are interacting with one another. That whatever history and story these objects carry with them, we are connected to that as well.
One facet of that history is the mining of Rare Earth Elements. Rare Earth Elements are a group of 17 elements which have been described as “the salt and pepper to technology.” Basically, anything with an “on” or “off” switch requires one of them to work: cell phones, lasers, jet engines, and green technologies (which problematically tend to require more of them). So what’s the problem? Unlike other minerals or metals, Rare Earth Elements aren’t highly concentrated in the ground. This means in order to make them usable for tech applications solutions like sulfuric acid are used to concentrate them. This produces an enormous amount of toxic waste. This toxic waste is collected in what is known in the industry as “tailing ponds.” In one of the largest refineries in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, 6 to 7 million liters of toxic waste are pumped into the tailing pond annually. Another tailing pond in Malaysia has been described as 3 times the size of central park.
This is just one facet of the problem though, and the story is not unique. Since the industrial revolution, inventions and products and their subsequent pollutants have been created and degraded, they have entered our food, water, air, and bodies. Our blood now contains new toxins and heavy metals, even rare earth elements, that it did not previously possess. We are literally becoming biologically closer to them, they are controlling, programming, and shaping us as well. More so, the physicality of these objects are beginning to witness more of our personal lives than our loved ones, and that means something, there is a physical relationship at least worth acknowledging, understanding, questioning, and reevaluating.
How can we truly be more connected, more efficient, grow, or have a better quality of life, when we have no connection or respect for where these products ultimately came from, and remain ignorant about the larger symbiotic life cycle? When these products elemental physicality are created from a place of violence, disrespect, or disregard that impacts our elemental physicality as well. Whether apples or Apple products, ultimately just like us, they come up from the ground and go back into the ground, if we are going to use our technology to connect and improve our quality of life, these connections and improvements, have to be done from the ground up.
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About Creativity:
I remember lying in the grass fully flattened. A stranger approached me and said, “Excuse me, are you alright? You seem sad.” And, I was. I had been thrown into a pool of transcended reality, and was now gasping for air. Prior to then, I had been extremely cautious dabbling in any sort of vulnerable state. Now, I found myself in a position where I had no choice. It felt simultaneously real and surreal. I was at seemingly both ends of my own personal psychosis spectrum.
As my limbs flailed, and my gasps softened, I emerged from the state feeling bewildered and even a bit idiotic. Eventually, I was ungracefully resurrected, back into a comfortable limbo state, however something had changed. I realized that it is there in the in-between, that risky place, where everyone exists on some level whether they know it or not. That in order to daydream, you have to be willing to accept the risk that you might fall asleep, only to be awoken by the realization that perhaps failure isn’t failure at all, only a less stagnated version of success.
It is perhaps people’s willingness to navigate that space, which gives me so much optimism. I am optimistic that we are floating in space and people still set their alarms. I am optimistic that people are willing to think about questions like “Is Psychosis a Prerequisite for Art?” and not get lost in their own realities, in our own collective unconscious, in the ridiculous absurdity of the human experience. I’m optimistic about puppies and rainbows and the impossible being totally possible. And, perhaps what I’m most optimistic about exists in the why?
When I think about the creative process I quickly come to this familiar void, the "why." The only thing that matters is an instinct. Like when you get up in the morning and reality changes, or look at a raging river and things become quiet, or see someone being born, or journey inward and find yourself outside, or see an atom and think about the earth.
What is that place? There is a feeling of both strangeness and familiarity, of understanding everything and nothing at the same time, of things being incredibly loud but quiet, of waves traveling in threes, of a beginning, middle, and end. Why?
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Poems:
Grandpa
Life glowed
Quietly
That never left him
He took me to the sea
Microscopic bits of wisdom
Lessons broken down
Into the smallest sparkly bits
That’s why I ate the sand
And all of its rocks
And ashes
And cigarette butts
Somewhere then
I stopped
Jenny
I’m in the yard
I’m in that funny corner
Running between branches and that fence
That fence that reminds me of my grandma’s
And I’m chasing myself
And she’s chasing herself
I don’t know why
But I do
Time is only going to be this clear
The sky is only going to be as firm as the ground
When I’m seven
And barefoot
And running
Logic
It just was
Like light
And water
And things that make sense
He knew that
And so did I
Like his eyes
Or that rocking chair
If things weren’t right
I didn’t know
Because they were
Beautiful
Love Letter to a Wall
You have built a wall
Every piece has been delicately ingrained and strategically placed. So much so, that you no longer know it’s there.
When you look up, you can’t see it.
When you rest against it, you can’t feel it.
Don’t take it personally, you say.
Besides, it’s a wall, it doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care if you try to go around it, or dig under it, or climb over it, or wish it away.
But then again, people change.
Love Letter to Sand
I curled up in a ball
next to the ocean
and the sand
full of its problems
held me
it didn’t have to
it shouldn’t have
but it did
My grains and fragments
cradled as wholeness
an abyss
a potentiality even
Love Letter to Ayati
Like trying to see through fire
or deep water
Her eyes told a story
I'm not sure whether it was
about pain
or grace
or the impermeable silence
of fire and water
but somewhere in the silence,
i understood thanks
as something greater than myself
a symbiotic relationship of everything
one does and doesn't understand