Life-changing? Meanings and voices.
PhD diary continued - aggressive hand dryers, modes of seeing, and questioning the qualities of own voice recording. Transient states of inbetweenness.
Objects of abhorrence
As much as I am able to fall in love with objects, or a particular type or category of objects, I am also able to hate them. To feel violently wounded by them.
Tiny toilets are essentially inaccessible. There is one particular public institution which I recently attended that possesses such. But it’s not the toilet itself that I cannot stand, but the hand dryer. A hand dryer that becomes activated suddenly, emitting hot air and a drilling, intrusive sound that makes me want to start flipping and flapping around like a fish taken out of the pond. I wonder if anyone else experiences the same rage, when the toilet doors open IN instead of OUT, resulting in even less room to actually enter, with a massively oversized long coat on, and turn around. I genuinely sense the hand dryer as an attack on my physical safety and mental stability. Rationally, I know it has no malicious intentions. But this awareness does not adjust my feeling. This is funny. But the rage is real.
Since a few years ago the feeling that something is inherently wrong with me had begun to dissipate in the ocean of knowledge that comes with the awareness of neurodivergence. Understanding is a strange word that spans realities of cognition and intellect, as well as the senses and emotion.
Clouds of meanings
This week has been life-changing for me. First times. Confirmations. Isn’t every week life-changing? It comes to a point in which I cannot write a statement without simultaneously questioning it. It has always been like this. The unspoken voice talking over the written voice. Images flooding over, with things understandable, but indescribable. Some good writers would say that there is no such thing as impossible to describe. I, on the contrary, like this awareness: of the limits of language, the limits of science, the limits of communication. One thing that appears to be without boundaries is experience. But that word also needs a separate chapter of definitions. And yet, can you not just feel its meaning?
I sometimes feel the meanings and definitions, the enormousness of signs, signifiers, and significance appearing as a heavy cloud, closing in on my head. I struggle to claim anything anymore. To know anything.
The only way out is to stop thinking. To allow myself to feel. To feel the way the air enters my lungs, the light falls on the walls, to run my fingertips on my own skin and the fabric of my clothes.
This week I faced the challenge of explaining the value of flicker film to an audience of undergraduate filmmaking students. The atmosphere of mixed intrigue and disbelief made it one of the most fun and thought-provoking experiences I’ve had so far.
I have been a little bit out of touch with my own research this week, as I was absorbed in working for jobs that do not yet pay off. Something on mind is Charles Tart’s definition of altered states of consciousness - he points out that it is not easy to explain and categorise them purely because of the fact that each individual experiences the word differently. What for some can appear to be an unusual visual range of perception and imagination, as experienced in a state of high fever hallucination or psychedelic substance-induced expansion of the senses, for others could be a normal way of seeing the world - he uses Tesla as an example of a person who has a controllable imagery in his usual state of consciousness. “When Tesla designed a machine, he did it in his head, without using physical drawings: nevertheless, he could instruct a dozen difference machinists how to make each separate part, to the nearest ten-thousandth of an inch, and the completed machine would fit together perfectly. […] for most of us is exotic imagery associated with d-ASCs, but what was for him the imagery of his ‘ordinary’” state (Tart, p.136). It immediately made me think of Temple Grandin’s descriptions of the way she designs and tests complex spatial machinery for farming. Was Tesla, like Grandin, autistic? What would their altered states look like in visual terms?
I have a lot of thoughts on the matter, but this week I do not feel like sharing many of them. I sense a need to immerse myself in texts and allow my words to form in the background, to only later be spilled on paper. I am enjoying the changing rhythmical sounds of the keyboard under my fingers, echoing around the empty gallery space in which I’m invigilating - like a goblin guard of the artworks that are particularly alluring for the visitors to touch. Beautiful and intricate textures make people want to get very close, pointing with extended fingers as they analyse the materials, while I extend my neck from my position in the corner, wanting to remain inconspicuous while ensuring the fingertip doesn’t touch the object.
Voice - working on new film
I have been procrastinating working on my new film, about which I was very excited when I started. I have been busy with other things, and my next supervisory meeting is still a week and a half away, so I do not have to share this work with anyone yet. But what I think really have been stopping me from continuing the edit is my voice. I am using recordings of myself reading out fragments of my journals, which, as text, present an interesting and acceptable portrait of a few months of hope and anxiety related to change, weaved with reflections on the nature of the self inspired by books I read in that time. Why can’t I just slam the words on, as an on-screen text? Would that be so bad? There are interesting ways to do it. But for this project I decided to work with the nature of the voice - with how strange it sounds, disembodied, monotone. I am working with my own frustration around how it sounds when I try to speak “naturally”. How I speak when I’m excited, when the speech speeds up or slows down, when I attempt to sound like myself. What do I sound like? What does my voice sound like to myself, and to others? After I got annoyed with first attempts, I then recorded myself speaking in a comfortably low monotone voice, which apparently sounds like AI. Would I want to use AI reader to present my innermost thoughts from my journals? AI is meant to imitate human voice - what if a human voice attempts to imitate AI?
The Sun was the tarot card that came up as guidance for my 2023, in some readings I did during the last full moon of 2022. I made no resolutions, but I set some intentions - wishes. The film encapsulates (in a rather unswallowable capsule, almost 20 minutes long) the sense of awaiting, of hope, awareness of changes. Hope that everything will not suddenly start collapsing. That each day brings me closer to where I want to be. Closer to myself - that is, if self really can be said to exist. To some realisation. February - checking on progress.
Saying that I achieved something indicates some milestones being passed. But it seems that each day is a milestone. I guess it is worth learning how to, by being happy with where one might be going, to be happy with where one is.