We shall be free

Last night i had a good friend come over, the one that i walked for 28 kilometers in the hot summer sun with backpacks and food to get to Sarmisegetuza Regia. After he left i spent a little while staring at the newspaper article about me. Strangely enough, it never actually felt like anything. I always imagined that i should be happy or sad or excited or ... somehow. But it didn't make me feel like anything. It was just something else i did.

I figured the reason and it's got something to do with my damn high expectations regarding any and everything, from driving to shooting to relationships and general human interaction. Perhaps i came to realize that my idea of how something should be will invariably be better, cleaner, faster and well ... better-er than reality. Reality will have chips and cracks and imperfections and their existence there will create an unhappiness which, i found, always overshadows the pleasure of the actual thing.

And now i take my foot off the gas, i park on the side of the road and stop to think: Is it really that, if you do learn and evolve (and implicitly so should your expectations) you will get to know an uncomfortable amount of information? Is it that the information and the things you imagine will always be better than the real thing and will almost always make you unhappy? Bogdan posed a good question last night: "Is it better to be an unhappy Socrates or a happy imbecile?". It's not ignorance that is bliss, it's stupidity and the comfort of not challenging and dissecting your core so much that you never really know what was there to begin with. I would observe, in this particular regard, that the need for self reflection and the desire to surpass your current condition as a being with the ability to be rational is in itself a rather damning activity.

Nobody tells you when you start reading and start questioning the process that if you do it right it will mess you up. It's just something that derives exclusively from extensive periods of observation and reflection (of which, it might indeed come as a shock, i am capable). I am not quite sure how and what needs to be done there. After the article, after my exhibition series and after all the brilliant things that have gone down this last period, i still tend to be critical (i suspect that indeed, if you are content with your work you stop evolving but this discontent with everything is just my way of being a complete idiot). I am still unhappy about how i do things, with my process and the fact that i am not as good as i expect myself to be. Dana and i were having this little debate regarding her opera singing and how she can relate to how i feel since she's rarely happy with her own results even though everyone else is mesmerized. I come to think that maybe we make art, we sing and we create objects to please ourselves. You're your own worst nightmare and most damning critic because in your head there's no place left to hide from yourself. You hide from others in your art but you hide from yourself in everything else except what you create. This is just my two pearls of wisdom for the day.