Focus on the difference! This is another contender for Silent Week.
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… in New Zealand! I have to balance yesterday’s old lady in Munich with an image from Auckland. This one here was taken at the Town Hall. Nothing much happening here either :). What you can’t see of course is, that behind my back, on Aotea Square, a noisy political demonstration is going on. I was amazed that this fellow could sit there and quietly read his newspaper, while news was happening right in front of him.
Now to a typical puppet subject… Emotional cross-dressing. I have been thinking about this for quite some time and I believe this is the real reason for my puppets’ existence. My puppets can have all these traits without being aggravating. They are not based on anybody in particular, but show easily recognised generic behaviour.
Emotional cross-dressing comes in different guises and is a kind of unintentional lie, a self-defense mechanism. These particular cross-dressers are people who, for some reason or another, hide their real emotions and pretend to have different feelings. It comes on a sliding scale with two poles. On one end you find the always friendly person, sweet and kind, but when you look away the bile rises straight to their eyeballs. On the other end of the scale is the old grump or tough guy, who pushes everybody away, but when you invest the time to know him better, he is the most generous and friendliest person ever. Of course there are a lot of shades between these two extremes.
In both cases the cross-dressers themselves suffer more than their surrounding, as they are not in sync with their own emotions and most of the time they have the feeling of being terribly misunderstood.
More often than not they are forced to cross-dress by expectations put on them, for example, by parents, spouses, friends. And they want nothing more than to oblige, to fulfill the expectations. But at one stage they have to, and will, crack.
PS: People who use these strategies to knowingly deceive others to get an advantage, I would call devious.
Remember the little boy entering the Woods of life without sign post in yesterday’s image? What will he look like in forty years time?
The path is meandering, but level; the trees are crooked!
I only hope he doesn’t lose the spring in his step!
Further to my post of yesterday… I had a few conversations since and I realised I wasn’t entirely clear in what I’ve said.
It is very sad, but ultimately I think (and this is my very own cheerless opinion) we are alone in the world. I believe there is no way, one human being can ever completely know and comprehend another living being (often we don’t know ourselves). At the same time we crave for others to understand our individuality, we are searching for closeness, for acceptance. We want to be understood, we want to be looked after, we want others to help us carry our burden and share our plight. We want for someone to complement what we are lacking. We want, we want, we want… But of course on our terms… People are selfish! But if we wouldn’t look after ourselves who would?
I can understand that humans look to Him and find solace. We are here on borrowed time and only once, so we have to make the best of it! There might be re-incarnation. I don’t know. I will find out one day. In the meantime I try to be nice to people. I say I try, as it doesn’t always work this way… I have no influence on how people perceive me. They might not like my frown lines, they might not like the pitch of my voice or my accent… all things I can’t change, and I shrug my shoulders and say: their problem not mine… On the other hand, if somebody is grumpy… How do I know what happened to them before we bumped into each other? Maybe their wife just left them, or their father had a car accident, or their child was diagnosed with an untreatable disease. Their grumpiness might not have anything to do with me at all…
It is this split second of eternity in which we meet and make a decision about whether we like or dislike a person. Scaaaaryyyy! And, be honest, once we have formed an opinion about someone it is very, very difficult to change.
To cut a long story short, what I am advocating is, find yourself a person who has similar values as you have, fall in love with this person and note, IN love is a completely different feeling than love itself. Being in love is a wonderful folly, and a period of exaggeration and best behaviour. Love itself is a feeling that has to be nourished to grow, a feeling of warmth despite all the flaws, the farts and burps. If it is allowed to grow it will lead to the ultimate trust… in the acceptance of two people in their individuality and differences. And this is what I mean by soul mate.
First a warning: Most people actually don’t want to be happy – as truly happy people are so, so boring. What makes life interesting are the spikes, not equilibrium.
I have learned to embrace my ups and downs. I have learned that the proverbial brick wall stops me only temporarily. I don’t have to force my way through it, there is always a way around it. Finding this detour often requires a pause, to sit down and ponder.
On my personal list of happiness there are only two items, and they are by no means fame and riches. On my list is one item you should have and one you shouldn’t. Not too difficult, is it?
The item you absolutely need to have is a soul mate!
What you need to get rid of are any personal expectations you have of him/her, so that you will keep this gem for a long long time to come!
As easy as…
Funnily enough, most of my friends seem to think the first part is the difficult one. In fact it is the second, the working on the relationship, trying not to re-model the person you’ve found to fit your ideas. Without expectation the ideas will grow together in due time :)
Then when you hit the brick wall your fall will be cushioned!
…The complete Like – What? installation. The figures are looking outwards and the connections at the modems form a pentagram. The heads are sitting on clay balls at the top of aluminum tubes and when somebody walks past they sway ever so slightly. I will leave the rest of the interpretation up to you…. you know the characters already :)
I wanted to make new puppets last weekend, but got side-tracked with revamping my blog. I updated the Home page and the About page and added the Milestones menu, though I haven’t added the installation characters to the Character page yet. This will have to wait until next weekend.
I am now in my seventh month of writing this blog and I do notice a gradual change from the initial difficulties of sharing my art with an unknown audience. It has become easier over time. The biggest hurdle for me is seeing how many gifted people are out there, and I wonder who should read all this…. I personally would like to have more time to spend reading the other blogs and discover new ones. In the end it is no different to real life is it? You have a couple of blogs you always check up on. You hang out with some more than with others, but it changes over time until you suddenly notice that you haven’t seen one for a while.
A big fat Thank you to all the people who check regularly on my progress. I really appreciate it!
I will have to concentrate on my book for a while and I was going to check out LULU last night, but then I skyped for ages with the other side of the world, so this didn’t happen. I came across a German self-publishing site called Tredition, this could become plan B.
Reading today’s post again, I notice it is all about what I wanted to do but didn’t … I guess I will have to start on my Procrastinator puppet soon.
Introducing Ms SM today. She is the fourth one of the installation puppets. I don’t know her real name. It might be Sue or Sophie Miller or even Steven, who knows. I don’t know what she looks like without her mask, but I hear she is an accountant in a big corporation and pretty dull to talk to. She just hides her real self from her colleagues by fading into the background during the day. A precaution that makes her own life more bearable. “Normal” people wouldn’t understand. Being her is difficult enough, even without all the ridicule and bullying. It can’t be easy to live two lives. Of course her web friends understand… she feels safer there than in “reality”.
Originally this puppet was supposed to be Witch Version 2. Only when she was completed did she reveal her real identity. She was virtually begging me to be allowed to become Ms SM.
To link it back to yesterday’s post: Is she living a lie?
This one is Liar. His long nose is a give-away (sorry, it is not very clear on the photo). To impress people he embellishes everything he says. His hair is made up of a net full of smallish fish… that is all he can catch with his tall tales. Sometimes I wonder if he believes his own stories. He certainly doesn’t look like a very happy person.
I started working with computers in the early eighties of the last century! I am showing my age now :)… My first job was at a computer book publisher. I was the first person in the office to get a hard drive… the envy of the entire company. All the others still had to fluff around with the “5 and a quarter inch” disks. If you have ever seen one of them, you know why they were called floppy. My dad bought his first computer in the late ’70s. A Commodore with a tape recorder attached as a storage medium… so a hard drive was pretty cool. But everything moved very quickly from there on.
I don’t reminiscent much about the times, I hardly have contact to my peers from then, but I clearly remember the gold rush aura that surrounded us. We were cool, man, and we owned the world. In reality we were pasty-faced nocturnal creatures, trying to find our place in society by simply creating a new one. Chat rooms were all the rage in our circles. (Remember those prehistoric modems on which you had to place the hand-set of the telephone?) The Web wasn’t invented then and there was no commerce on the internet, it was primarily a military and scholarly network. (By the way, monitors came in a choice of green or amber and when you wanted to create a graph you had to stack asterisks on top of each other, do I need to say more?)
In the editor’s room we had a bet going. One of the male editors had to pretend to be a woman in the chat rooms. To win the bet – a crate of beer – he had to keep it up for six months undetected. He won! This experience was quite an eye-opener and I guess it explains my suspicions of social networks.
I can not remember ever having been so void of thoughts as I am at the moment. All I can think of is what shall I cook for dinner to feed the troops and I desperately need to clean the house, it’s spring. But absolutely no thoughts beyond the chores. This sort of freaks me out. Particularly as I normally don’t think about daily stuff at all, it just seems to happen on the fly. For a week now my head is packed tightly into cotton wool. I wonder when the cloud will lift.
dedepuppets 