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Went out to BORDERS to look at NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS magazine. Enjoyed some works by Amy Mayfield http://www.amyemayfield.com and Paul Nudd http://paulnudd.com/

Also ran through DUNE which i have not read before. I liked how it begins with a witch visiting paul. 

As i was walking about the mall, i felt the waves of writing energy begin its bubbling ascension into my consciousness. I’m quite glad that the symposium is just a day behind the start of national novel writing month. It will really put me into a writing mode, plus talking to students who are creative writing classes would help me go through my own creative processes and set the ball rolling.

 The imagination is heightened and excited. The drug is taking effect. 

 

All in the name of randomness. 

Randommess forces the mind to make connections across disparate ideas and themes. It forces new neural networks to be created.  It wakes up the mind to new possibilities. 

About 70 people will be moving through the room, with about 14 pages blown up and displayed on the wall. They will go about reading from any location they like, pick up the scraps, read it to make some kind of connection. Through words or ideas. 

I enjoy the non-linearity of my own writing. I justify it by the fact that my content and imagination speaks about phenomena, entities and ideas that are n on-local, from another dimension. IN those dimensions, space and time operates differently. Some of the laws may not even apply. 

My approach to achieving these states of writing varies. Primarily, my creative process involves sleep deprivation, when the mind is in fatigue and laws of logic is subordinated and the element of dream or hypnagogic states take control. Like how one sees images between sleeping and waking, sleep deprivation brings out this state in terms of thought. They’re usually not connected and operates far deeper in the dreaming world, erasing most logical structures. 

more updates later, from the pink scrapbook. 

It’s name, i forget, but its form, i cannot erase it from mind. 

It had egg like slime, dripping off its scaly, oblong body and it slithered like a serpent upon the wasteland. It couldn’t move as fast, or sting like a scorpion, but its stench alone was what made men lose their minds. 

It ate into your brain, seeped into your bones, choked you into submission, and disturbed the regularity of your lungs. 

gas masks were hard to come by in those periods so, the watchtowers had to look out for this monster, and raise the alarm upon sighting it, and the villagers would plunge themselves into impossible darkness, deep below, to escape the slug and it’s odor of madness.

Yet. For me, its noxious death vapors posed no harm. For i was not of this place and time. 

So it was given unto my hands to kill this beast. 

Do not mistake me. I am no hero. i sold books in the old days, before the madness of 1000.100 took over. I had no formal training in violence. In fact, I was never a violent man. 

But the fear of the children, the weeping of the women forced my hand and i had no choice but to take up this endeavor.  

The elders gave me torches made from firewood and stakes made from old furniture. They said their prayers, gave me blessings and sent me on my way. 

I waited by the watchtower, for the alarm to be raised. Days and nights passed, and i found myself growing older, faster before one final night, in the last days, when the alarm finally rang. 

The watchmen fled, as the people hid. I was left alone to face this thing. 

Building up courage, i lit the torches and moved out towards the beast. My heart pounding in my mouth as i gathered strength to face down this monster. 

but i could not kill it. 

why?

Because, in the final moments, before i could leap forward and drive the cursed sticks into its heart. 

It wept before me. And it spoke in a strange language that i could somehow understand. 

it was afraid and joyful at the same time. It kept saying, “Me found you, me found lost soul.” and then i knew. 

this monster wasn’t out to kill the people. It was out there in search of me, its higher self. 

i dropped the torches. Put out the fires and approached this lowly beast. The lightheadedness that i suffered so long, subsided and my fear vanished in that night’s wind. 

I touched its trembling face and felt my own inner self consoled. I gazed upon the monstrosity before me and felt myself become whole. 

“Let  us go home” I told myself and the beast was delighted. it gaped open its yawning abysmal mouth and i crawled into it like a child returning to its womb and together, we abandoned the village, in search of a place to call home. 

Enjoy. 

.

The writing mode is slowly taking over as the brushes, art table, paints and the hundreds of other art making things are temporarily kept away. To rest. Bristles must sleep too. They have worked hard. 

After the morning classes, I had to kill some 3 hours before a meeting at the national library board  to prepare stuff for this: http://blogs.nlb.gov.sg/esl/symposium/

I brought down some dark ambient music for the segment i’m involved in. Since its Halloween. LUSTMORD’S “The Dark Places of The Earth” is slow, sprawling, enigmatic rumbling of unseen monstrous serpents moving in the great dark beyond the night blindness. Perfect to set a subtle mood for eerie-ness as smnoke machine fog out teh room and people wander about in the semi-lit room reading random pages from my book VONTINUUM and VONTINUUI, which is availabe for free PDF download here: http://aftervolter.wordpress.com/

I know. I’ve mentioned it here before but i’m shameless. I shall repeat. 

Anyway, i’ll also be talking about my creative process and the act of randomness in literature and how it affects the mind. Obviously i haven’t locked down my discussion  map. which is shall update here over the next 2 days before the event on Friday. Like that, i’ll be able to at least write out the stuff i’m going to talk about before teh presentation, so i can see it before me and decide if it’s worth mentioning. It’ll involve ideas of how sleep and food deprivation, writing in the dark. Roaming the streets in the dead of night with pen and paper, can be sources of inspiration for weird literature. 

 

One of the topics i’ll touch on may be  how “If one does not find anything interesting to read or look at in art, then create it for yourself. You have your own sensibilities and admirations and to a certain degree, you have a right express those wants to satisfy your own creative needs.” Does it make sense? I read thsi somewhere and it had stuck with me throughout since most of my art and writing is very much a personal vision of dissonance, abstraction, chaos and a kind of organic horror that shifts with my deep moody moods and is not easily quelled by whatever is out there. 

Anyway, iit was a very long day for me from morning and i’m probably gonna end up rambling nonsense instead. BUt nonsense is good as Doctor Seuss said. 

It wakes up the mind. 

The machinery of paints and pens closes and the writing man of 2209 will awaken . NULL goes home, spaced out, back to the space he belongs to. 

The last four days will be a post-mortem, and an inside look into my other form of art making. Writing. 

Not in the right state to have a reaction to the completion of the 40 pieces. But it will come later, as the sun sets.

It’s not entirely over in terms of days. But like the wilderness, the 40 had come and gone, new demons named, new avatars born, new scenes remembered, and new forms created. 

We will speak again. 

Thank you for watching. 

ink. cut out canvas. pen. acyclic, correction fluid and charcoal on canvas pad. 

29.7cm X 42cm

16”by20”

Another scene out of an alternate universe. The overgrown avatar is suspended by teh tendrils of the witch-mother-thing as the three deciders approach to determine the child-king’s nebula quotient. 

mixed media collage on construction paper.

12” by 18”