There are emotions that I couldn't possibly know, or feel, or experience. But I do, anyway.

Maybe you've seen a film or read a book about something so foreign to your world of experience that you shouldn't be able to empathize with the characters; yet in that moment of watching, of reading, you do empathize. You begin to feel that there is some universal human response to anything--you begin to feel that you understand.

Goethe wrote: I have never heard of a crime I couldn't imagine committing myself.

If you lost everything that ever meant anything to you, if your faith was destroyed, who would you be? Would you be capable of actions that seem abominable to you, now?

On the other side of the coin, if you gained everything, if all your needs and wants were filled, who would you be? Would you have the same thoughts and feelings and desires that you do right now?

Can you really empathize with someone who has lost everything?
Can you empathize with someone who has everything?

What does it mean to lose hope?
What does it mean to despair?
What does it mean to find hope, after all hope was lost?
What does it mean to dream about ideals, when your life is about dealing with Reality?
What does it mean to want what you don't, or cannot have?
What does it mean to learn something new?
What does it mean to let yourself see the world from a new perspective?

What is it about human beings that makes us need to force order upon chaos? Why are names so important? Why do we need to understand what we feel?

Why do we need to be understood by someone else? Why is talking, sharing, intimacy so important?

What happens when someone we know loses something essential, something root and core to life?

What happens when a woman has a miscarriage?
What has she lost?
What can she find?
What can she share about loss with a man?
What can a man know about miscarriage?
What can a man share with a woman who has lost?

Can something like loss be shared?
Maybe nothing can be shared, except the attempt to share.

Or, maybe, everything can be, and always is shared, whether you believe it or not.

Maybe our worst moments only seem unique, because we want special pain.
Maybe we hold on to the most frightening experiences in order to feel special.
Maybe we want our lives to be worthy of pity.
Maybe we need to believe our pain is terrible as rape, or murder, or crime.
Maybe our suffering depends on the belief that we are victims.

Maybe we really are the same--maybe every human experience, every human emotion is exactly that: human.

Maybe we guard our experiences to separate ourselves from the pack. Maybe we want to believe that we have our own identity.

And maybe it doesn't matter whether the experience is unique, or whether the nightmare is ours alone, or whether the love of which we dream is or ever could be real. Maybe, in the end, it is only the attempt that is real. Is dreaming real? Is hoping real? Is loving real?

Is it possible to find dreams, or hopes? Or love?
Is it possible to find anything, if you're just going with the flow?
Is it possible to find without trying?

For many dopey years of my life, I believed this: the only real things are those that land squarely on your plate. Now I think: the only real things are those things that you pretend are real.

Henry James wrote: Landscape is character.

Two different people walk down the same street. Only: it can never be the same street.

This makes life a matter of responsibility. Whatever you choose to believe is, in fact, real. You are the maker of the experience. You tell the story. You are the one who shares the story. You are the one who refuses to share. You are the one who refuses to believe.

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog

** Sculpture by Mary Nohl
More Sculpture by Mary Nohl

Mary Nohl: Full Size One	Mary Nohl: Full Size Two	Mary Nohl: Full Size Three

More art by Mary Nohl

I woke up thinking about Mary Nohl this morning. Thinking about darkness, and dreams, and waking dreams that seem dark from the outside. She lived here, when she was alive. This was her home.

Later, I was thinking about Saussure. Thought and Sound. This figure on the left was his idea. Everything changed because of him. He said that Thought (A) has no meaningful pieces; he said Sound (B) has no meaningful pieces. They are unbroken waves.

What we call words are arbitrary segmentations: marriages between arbitrarily segmented Thought and arbitrarily segmented Sound. Words do not come from inside us. They have meaning through random social use.

Saussure suggests the image of a piece of paper, a front and a back.

Think of a word as a sign. It has two parts: a front and a back. It has a sound that signifies. It makes an assocation that is signified. Together they make a sign which social relations make meaningful.

But they are arbitrary. That is to say: words have NO INSTRINSIC VALUE. They are random constructions that come from outside of you.

Waking and Dreaming, Thought and Sound. Meaning and Value. The way we communicate the most important things has nothing to do with Real. The way is nothing more than a convention based on waves and waves and waves.

More art by Mary Nohl

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog

** POSTSCRIPT: SURROGATE **

Surrogate's Comment, Part I:

"I told her, 'Sure, you're hair looks okay, it's just not as nice as it was before.'

Then spent the next five years trying to use words similar to the quote from your piece to excuse the statement. Even pointing out that what I'd said didn't signifiy what she'd thought it had signified."

Good point, huh? Who was right? Did your comment signify what you thought or what she thought? Neither, it turns out, though it might not seem fair that YOU'RE not signifying what YOU'RE thinking. The sign doesn't have a value unless everyone agrees--and the agreement isn't based on a consensus. It's random. It's an unconscious process.

Surrogate's Comment, Part II:

"Maybe it's more like this: remove the bar between "sign" and the other two words, then treat the thing as a proper equation, cuz I can damn well tell you us "signifiers" get divided by SOMEthing!"

Very perceptive. In my ramblings, I only offered half of the equation (or, the distilled version of the whole equation. Here's the whole shmeer, as seen by Roland Barthes:

If this kind of thing could be divided into pieces of time, then 1-3 would be the first step: the level of language. I-III would be the second step: the level of myth. To use a Barthes' example, here's how it works:

1. Black Pebble = Empty Signifier. Maybe you think it's smooth and shiny; maybe she thinks it's rough and dull. The pebble itself has no meaning.

But suppose society develops a system where every human being must pick a pebble from a bag. If someone picks a diamond, he/she becomes Sovereign; if, however, someone picks a black pebble, he/she is immediately sentenced to death. Then:

2. Death Sentence = Signified. Now the Signifier isn't empty. It is weighted by the definite Signified: Black Pebble signifies Death. So:

3. The Sign is Full (it has a signifier and a signified). But now the Sign itself begins to Signify:

I. Sign is Emptied of Meaning; Becomes new SIGNIFIER. Instead of its color or size or texture that signifies, it is the Sign itself that begins to SIGNIFY. The Sign's meaning, now, is only there to refer to a CONCEPT:

II. The Sign No Longer has Meaning: It SIGNIFIES A CONCEPT. The CONCEPT is a model (like Barthes' model, above). It is a reference to the emptied Meaning of the Sign, rather than to a real object. The reference is to the image of the object rather than the object itself *think Warhol's painting of the can of Campbell's Tomato Soup). The pebble becomes a myth:

III. The pebble becomes a way of referring to its own origins, rather than to itself.

Of course, this can't be broken into pieces of time. Everything that signifies (pebbles, words, you, haircuts) is itself a sign. Everything refers to its origins, while imposing the current social value upon us now. Everything has meaning ONLY BECAUSE OF THE ARBITRARY, MEANINGLESS SPLIT that slices a wave into pieces. A signifier is a full sign being sliced into emptiness; it can only refer to a arbitrary representation of the past.

More art by Mary Nohl

RECIPE:

1. When the whiskey is good but it isn't fine, pour into sipping glass.
2. Add one cube of ice.
3. Let sit for two minutes, then gently swirl the glass.

*If you can't hear the clink of the ice, you're not swirling; you're procrastinating.
*If you see any residue near the brim, you're not swirling; you're washing your glass.

4. Take one steady sip to taste. Drinking whiskey on ice is a process of tasting to make sure your drink is ready, until your drink is gone.
5. Refill with new whiskey, new cube of ice.

The strangest part of drinking whiskey on ice is the progressive loss of experience. You have whiskey. You have ice. You are drinking the same quantity of whiskey that you would without the ice. And at the same time, the whiskey cannot taste the same. So, you expect the ice to change the whiskey's flavor. You expect the ice to change the whiskey's temperature.

But it doesn't. If you have left the ice cube in your whiskey long enough for either whiskey change to occur, you haven't done it right. What you need to do is change the ice, not the whiskey.

When you taste your whiskey on ice, there is nothing but sadness. The whiskey is there, underneath, as pure and dangerous and potent as ever. But at the edges, and over the uncertain, invisible surface, you can taste the ice. The whiskey is like a submerged bubble that you cannot grasp without bursting. When tasted correctly, the drink is about the warming of what has been frozen, and remembering that there was true whiskey to be sipped, before you added ice; it is not about the whiskey, but about the remembering of the ice that prevents you from tasting the whiskey.

Sometimes adding ice is the only way to drink your whiskey. Nevertheless, it is a terrible drink.

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog

What's the deal with heavy objects? What is it about heavy objects that makes human beings want them lifted?

In the beginning, maybe it's enough to locate heavy objects. But for some reason the run-of-the-mill heavy objects we find do not seem quite as heavy as they once did.

And then it's no longer enough to find our own heavy objects to haul around the yard. We need to show other people our heavy objects. We need a community consensus.  We need to determine for society as a whole which objects are heavy, and which objects are really, really heavy. Society usually decides that an object isn't really heavy unless the smallest percentage of the people can lift it while the rest of the masses cannot. If more than one person can lift an object, then we'll ask: How heavy can the object really be?

If one person can lift the object, then it seems likely that other folks, somewhere, will be able to lift that object as well--maybe strange folks from far away places with their alien, funky accents and exotic cooking spices. It becomes an obsession, doesn't it, this endless search for heavier and heavier objects, until at last the only truly heavy objects are the ones that cannot be lifted with a squat and a grunt. Brains are needed to lift the heaviest objects.  In theory.

At this stage in human civilization, lifting heavy objects--essential though the objects and their liftings may be--is seen as somewhat childish. It would be best, we think, if smart people, or at the very least, rich people, were to develop ways to lift obscenely heavy things but then allow dumb people to use those ways to accomplish all the truly heavy lifting.

The theory that allows the lifting becomes the lofty purpose or truth of human evolution, while the lifting process itself becomes menial. The Priests of Knowledge possess the will, or agency, to tend the sacred theory.  The peasants carrying large rocks around on their backs, on the other hand, must surrender their will, or agency, to the smartypantses--if, that is, they want to participate at all in the almighty purpose of heavy-rock lifting.

And in fact they do want to participate. We all do. But lifting theory demands that we forget why we spend our energy lifting only the very heaviest of objects.

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog