it's helena

I used to say I hate the color orange. Plastic-looking orange, industrial orange, cheap orange.

I still say I hate the heat. Hot weather makes me feel groggy and indolent.

And I love the rain. It makes me feel excited and alive.

Are these opinions real? Isn't an opinion an a priori fabricated posture, a way of closing off to the world, to reality, of living in one's skull-sized kingdom of the mind?

Being attentive versus being assertive.

Being empty versus... thinking, feeling? Falling prey to habituated thought, like a train whose tracks lead only to past (fabricated) terrains?

yooooo

On having opinions

Is a skillful mind an opinionated one ?

In my current drawing practice I am interested in teasing appart habituated gestures, opinions, postures.

I alternate observational drawing with loose, free, "primary" drawing. I often start with observational drawing in perhaps a still life tradition. These fragments of my relationship to reality ground the drawing in a real, living space. Then, heeding the needs of the format, the composition, the shapes, the values, colours and textures, free lines and shapes complete the picture.

In this way I think the subject of my drawings is drawing itself. This makes for an abstract imaginative scope. I don't tell stories of people or places.

Drawing, for me, is a way of probing reality and one's relationship to it, of feeling that line between where our mind ends and where reality or alterity begins.

Sometimes the drawing starts from what I'll call a convention -- an arabesque, a star, a cloud. If in these drawings I also probe my relationship to reality, this reality has more to do with image culture than with what is given (in nature, etc.).

This thinking about reality grew out of an interest in Zen. I think reality is the alterity at the other side of our senses, our mind, our emotions. I think probing that line between our projections and what's real and beyond us is a kind of spiritual hygiene.

As to opinions and the color orange, the heat and the rain, you could say that line between projections and reality is right where opinion begins.

The heat is the heat; the rain, the rain; unpleasant is unpleasant and pleasant is pleasant.

I'm reminded of Charles Bernstein's "looking for truth but finding only memory".

But what does this entail with regards to our political postures, our place in the worldly state of things?

WORDLY OPINIONS:
(wo)men are trash
bankers are trash
nature is holy
fuck the police.

Florent,
what do you think?

And Taeko, what about you?

Here I drew my field of vision, mapping space around me as I perceive it, selecting what's salient, what's focused, relativizing spatial relationships

I draw on scrap pieces of paper or in notebooks. I care about varying line quality and intensity.

the body and the soul and the intersubjective self


can bodily postures bypass the symbolic?
are represented bodies a felt reality in the body of the onlooker?

opinions about things are as volatile and precarious as the things they bear on.

An opinion about heat is relative to a context where humans are expected to express an opinion on something, otherwise it could be irrelevant.
In the same way, the concept of heat is relative to a context where the individuals are able to feel heat, otherwise it would be irrelevant too.

Heat is a necessary experiment to mammals and most living beings.
Opinion is a necessary experiment to socialized civilized individuals, as we define ourselves with them. As soon as you consider the game, you can't stay withdrawn anymore. Considering means getting involved. Living in society means choosing.

If choice, if opinion is necessary to life in society, then we shouldn't be willing to give up on them, but on the contrary embody them with a dyonisiac passion, ass being willing to say "this is my person, this is my role, and I'll live it till my last breathe"
Problem is nowadays, roles are less clearly defines, personality fades away in the flow of multifaceted daily life and always changing influences. If the self is fragilized, it might not consider opinion, demarcation from others as an important things.

But if one believes in their opinions in the first place, with no retreat from it, it's the sign of a weak spirit.
Doubting them is the path to wisdom.
Embodying them with existential passion while knowing they're absurd is divine life.

Helena, Florent,

I hear you, I feel you, and I am absolutely with you for what you said about the nakedness of our opinions.
It is beyond relatable and is in fact easily one of my existential concerns.

Working as a recruiter, my job was to ask students what kind of career you are looking for. Asking what kind of life you want, and explaining how finding these “true self” help them realise that my company can offer what they wish for.
Of course, it was not as religious as it sounds, and it was done in a reserved manner, in fact, it was actually based on their experiences in life.
But still, I greatly relied on an assumption that everyone just naturally knows what kind of person he/she/they are, and any opinion is spoken with a sense of “truth”.


That being said, if we turn our attention to components of our life on the smallest scale possible, we end up with endless encounters of the microbiome.
If we ask where all they come from, they come from the food and water we consume in daily life.
The more we ask ourselves where your opinion, or even where you and your subjective experiences drive from, the farther it takes us.
Everything ‘we think we think’ finds itself entangled in a jungle of spider thread, and blocks us from moving in any direction whatsoever.


How it is then ever possible to reclaim the kingdom of self again? Or, do opinions really have to be owned by the individuals?
For us, it seems too old-fashioned and unrealistic to be completely devout and say ‘I just have a faith in my opinions’.

Charles Bernstein's "looking for truth but finding only memory" is helpful in this regard.
The term memory here shall not be only confined to brain memory and can be extended to the existence of bodily memory.
Some immunologists describe the immune system as an "emergent system with self-determination by living memory”. With the constant filtering of self according to bodily memory of inner self, the self-organising system decides either to accept/reject other entities seeking entry to your body.


Assuming that is one kind of borderline we may draw between you and others, this mode of understanding still leaves some critical questions left:
Are our opinions selflessly subject to past experiences? Where do our urge and passion to break away from the past drive from? If we are the zombi that only lives on our memories, can we call this state of being as living?

As far as I am concerned (with a big ego!), this is the moment we begin to appreciate encounters with others. The first trigger or draft of your opinion might be produced in your body according to past experiences, but you also have to feel a particular interaction with other things in the world (= how Latin understood this as anima) to formalise reactionary sentiments. Your past experiences serve as username, and the interaction with the outer world as a password to unlock your opinion.