4 August 2002: We All Contribute

Well, I’ll try to update as often as I can, but it turns out that this journal is no subsitute for Morning Pages. See, it’s the audience thing. No matter how much I try to just treat this like free writing, I still know there’s an audience. Morning Pages, on the other hand, are just for me. Which feels unproductive, because what’s the point of art without an audience? Ah, but there is a point. The point is to do some of my art just for me, if for no other reason than to find out what I have to say when it is just me, unaffected by the presence of even the most hypothetical of observers.

School starts again for me in a couple of weeks, and with it, my first animation class. Looking forward to making more art, new kinds of art. But the art that pleases me the most these days is the ongoing collaboration of the Pack, on the project of creating ourselves. Here I am writing in my online journal, which I was inspired to create by Geminica, Zann, and Bonky (Hey Zann! Write more entries!). My life is not separable from the life of the Pack. What would I be without the influence of Argus in my life, or Moly, or the Khan? What would they be without my influence? What would any of us be without the influence of the others? The question is unanswerable; it’s like asking what America would be like today if Western Europe had sunk into the Atlantic during the Middle Ages. But pervasive and intricate as the web of mutual influence is, one can nonetheless sometimes see little bits, specific elements brought to the pack by specific people.

I look at my shelf of music and my eyes light on the Spin Doctors CDs, and I remember my senior year of high school, hanging out in the empty auditorium listening to Jump play the piano and sing, and saying, "You’re really good. This is what you should do with your life." I look elsewhere on the shelf and remember Bonky introducing me to They Might Be Giants and Tom Waits, the Khan introducing me to Jethro Tull, Moly introducing me to the Basement Tapes. I look at the latest Cerebus on my desk, issue 280 of 300, and remember when Argus introduced me to the comic in high school, when there were only 84 issues, which I read in his room after school over the course of a week, while he worked on his Runequest game.

I look at the list of musical recommendations on Geminica’s "Investigations and Archives" page, and when I see the entry for T. Rex, I think, "Ah, that’s my bad influence on her." I look at Broken Wind’s journal entry for today and see a photo of Aleph and Da Rong Jo playing with flaming bokken, and I recognize my influence again, and remember walking across the front lawn at Princeton High School and telling Argus, at the exact moment it occurred to me for the first time, that I was going to create a new style of aikido one day, just for our friends (I don't think we'd started using the word Pack yet), and that it would be cool if a bunch of them became black belts in it, but that the most important thing, to me, would be for everyone to know at least a little bit, to have it be part of the group vocabulary.

We all contribute, we all teach each other, show each other where the good stuff is. I get into aikido, and I get some of the Pack into playing with bokken. Others get into Burning Man, and get some of the Pack into spinning fire. And then Aleph has the idea of playing with specially-designed bokken that have been dipped in kerosene and set afire... this is Art as an alchemical process, multiple elements combining to form something beautiful and new.

There are 16 links on my page of Pack websites now... still waiting for Argus to get his stuff back online, and for the Khan and Moly to get their sites up.

She'll be back from Maui in two weeks. Wow.