"Don't just play—do something!", Jack Abele, 01.21.24.
This is a companion piece to the collage I made about moving into the first place that felt like my home back in '21 (shown below). They have matching frames and are displayed together above our dining table! This second piece is a reflection on how my relationship to "home" has evolved since then, especially after proposing to my now fiancé last month. I'm really proud of it!
In the cold, thin clouds of interstellar space, written in the precise message of starlight:
What made you so interested in fireflies?
Imagine that they propel the environment into play: they STAND OUT, add color, chaos, curves moving behind and below, inside, outward along feedback loops, perplexing positive panic persuaded to make another form of animal art.
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, a beautiful structure, flamboyantly scuzzy, sassy, a full bouquet of many wild ideas — a dazzling interplay between lightness and unclarity, trying things out, fancy, whimsical records looped with webs, half-truth surface textures composed of swirls within swirls, a performance of information, scene-setting details with many impressive, more tongue-in-cheek, unforeseeable aspects relatively stable and evolving at the same time.
The trouble with love is it's hard to describe in simple and consistent words. Beyond the jolting familiarity of self-similar, self-referential tessellating hues, the little comedy-drama fictions... you see openness, possibilities toward change; our very existence together antidote to the dull grind of the paradox that we live every moment in an indifferent universe yet having so much fun with friends, local communities, places, faces, even muddy bog holes.
Music! A Tribe Called Quest, The Beastie Boys, The Breeders, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, Santana and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mud-caked at Woodstock, picking up Space Age scrap, cutting collaged paper, playing with magical little lights, heretically evolving in this meaningless, magnificent place fine-tuned just right to allow for life, love, and grunge to exist nevertheless.
Maybe what keeps me here, making art, is how beautiful it is for optimism to become the first expression of hope despite danger amid the disparate depth of our universe created by chaos.
Movement characterizes my "youthful, dynamic" journey, escapes to infinite other places somewhere else, afraid of considering complicated survival long-term, wherein risk is worth the reward. But something about your windy city reminded me what strange, cascading effects the fingers of two hands form together, intersect one another, interfere with fate, interlace like light radiating rays woven, at certain points, into dynamic singularities.
Mutualism is a happy hybrid of symmetry and chaos — a relationship, it's like the entire forest is blinking in sync.
Just as the fun is to make up a great story, the writer in me calls this piece, "Don't just play— do something!"
This time around, living offers a profound pivot from playing a game. Today we confront as animals, we're not far from dogs, domesticated punks at heart, manifold.
I am humbled, exhilarated, afraid yet strangely calm and clear "On Bended Knee"
(The term ground seems inapt.)
...Nor is it possible to describe...
The closest feeling to being the world itself? It is to have loved someone so much that you wanted to spend the rest of your lifetime with them, with each other.
We're writing a book. Adding a stroke of paint and words to illustrate what we became, a bright third dimension that can be seen from space to meet the generations to come, to simulate the uncountable whimsies they could achieve.
The mind already knows before the key touches the lock.
To watch firefly swarms with a mangy mutt.
That must be quite a sight to see.
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