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Alone. Together. In Conversation And Thought
opens on September 2nd and runs until October 1st. We
invite you and anyone you have ever
known/seen/heard/thought about to join us in the
VITRINE at Platform Contemporary Art Spaces
(Degraves Street Subway, Melbourne, Victoria)
between the hours of 10 – 4pm Monday to Thursday.
Interviews are also available at requested times, just
send us an email at: [email protected].
Here you can come and record your responses to a
series of questions about loneliness, connectedness and
what it means to be human as well as pose questions to
others and listen to anonymous contributions from
those who have come before you. This exhibition is the
first stage in a major public exhibition that will take
place at Platform Contemporary Art Spaces in May
2012.
www.alonetogetherinconversationandthought.com
CONTENTS:
P.1. Talk to Us About Loneliness.
P.3. Think about this. This Great Pull in Us to Connect.
P.5. Human Under Alanna Lorenzon
P.6. Story
P.8. Your Name Here Kirsty Hulm
P.9 That Feeling
P.14 You Will Feel Heavier and Warmer. Laura Delaney
P.15 Sigh Out Laura Delaney
P.16 One and Other/ OneAnother Low Definition/ High
Definition Selves
P.18 Ships Laura Delaney
P.19 Surface
P.20 Look at the Stars, Look how they Shine for you.
P.22 When You Are Ready Laura Delaney
Talk To Us About Lonel iness It would be no surprise if the invitation to talk about loneliness were to illicit as many different discussions as there are participants in this little project. Loneliness is a very ambiguous and intensely personal experience. Its precise qualities are elusive. My encounters with loneliness make me think of it as not one emotion, but rather a valve that opens us up to an infinite and infinitely diverse supply of emotions, indescribable feelings, vague thoughts and experiences both productive and destructive in nature. Its presence can dissipate fears or heighten them. It can be a driving force for change while at other times a cause for defeat. It can cause deep introspection and contemplation or a desire for the reckless abandon of internal monologues in exchange for the superfluous company of others. One thing I think to be true is that the intense and intimate effect that loneliness has on its beholder brings with it a tendency to keep it private from the outside world. Loneliness as the central subject for an art project was motivated by the social networking site facebook. It is a well documented cliché, but I couldn’t help feel that in the process of absently scrolling through pages of friends and friends of friends of friends (ad infinitum), that the sense of connectedness this website was supposedly facilitating, was drowned out by a voice inside me asking ‘Why aren’t you living a life as fulfilling and exiting as theirs?’ On an intellectual level I know most of us (if others are anything like myself) use facebook as a kind of personal PR campaign and portray a predominantly positive and, compared to our actual lives, well manicured image of ourselves. I know that one cannot take the facebook persona of another person as a summary of how their life is travelling in the three-dimensional and non-cyber world outside. On some level though, I find the travel photos of people I hardly know in a country I know nothing about, the thousands of happy snaps of laughing groups of friends on 2am dance floors, the hilarious and confidently witty banter that permeates each page and the endless list of events hosted and events attended take their toll. Perhaps it is partly due to the fact that in order to even access the website, one tends to be at home, alone, and therefore more susceptible to the thought that everyone else is out having a swell and troubling-thought-free time, but accessing facebook frequently leaves me questioning myself and measuring my full back catalogue of filler-tracks, unreleased demo songs, failed concept albums and lesser known collaborations/guest appearances with the greatest hits of other lives. Ultimately, when pitted against the two dimensional, smiling cyber versions of my facebook friends, my flawed and imperfect life never quite stacks up.
As it turns out, this feeling is far from uncommon. A study that grabbed my attention Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence of Other’s Negative Emotions details a series of experiments conducted on first year University students in the USA to determine how they perceived the emotional lives of those around them. The researchers conclude:
In this series of studies, we have demonstrated that people make systematic errors in perceiving others’ emotional lives, underestimating the extent to which other people suffer negative emotional experiences and sometimes overestimating the extent of others’ positive emotions 1
So, perhaps the shiny people that you know are unhappier than you think. For me, I find this reassuring. Not because I derive pleasure from the extent to which other people are unhappy, but because of the possibility that we share more of an emotional synchronicity with one another than we realise. It doesn’t undermine the significance of the emotions I feel to know that others may feel these also. I think it probably makes it easier to accept them for what they are and to know that we are not alone in our loneliness. Maybe it is a new phenomenon, or maybe it is just the way it has always been (probably the latter) but it is possible that the volume of our successes is turned up a little too loud. We are becoming increasingly good at sharing our triumphs, however miniscule, with an ever widening audience whilst the other end of our emotional spectrum is left to simmer quietly within ourselves. Alone. Together. In Conversation And Thought is an attempt at encouraging the conversation that frequently plays too quietly to be heard. We invite you to anonymously contribute to a dialogue about what it means to be a person. Simple really. Obvious even. Unlike an empirical study there is no rigorous process in place to minimise extraneous variables. It is also not a counselling service. This is not therapy. We are not able to offer any comforting advice. However, we believe that through your honest contributions, small steps can be taken towards a more empathetic and understanding community. Oh yes, and did we mention we are turning it all into art? -Edward Gould
1 Jordan, AH, Monin, B, Dweck, CS, Lovett, BJ, John, OP, Gross, JJ 2011, ‘Misery Has More Company Thank People Think:
Underestimating the Prevalence of Others’ Negative Emotions’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 37, p.133, viewed 18th August 2011, < http://timewellness.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/jordan-et-al-2011-misery-has-more-
company.pdf>
Think About This , This Great Pul l In Us To Connec t . 2 Implicit in this project is the confidence that what humans think and feel matters. That a story told can have resonance for another and that there is worth and value in shared communication. Ed and I have created a simple structure for a project that will be completed by the generous participation of those who are willing to lend their voices. It will be this collection of anonymous identities that will colour in the lines we have drawn up. Loneliness is a complicated and subjective experience. Each individual we have interviewed has described a distinct experience of what they perceive as loneliness. One interviewee explained: I just feel a lack of interest in general, even within myself, for the world around me, perhaps a lack of colour. Loneliness isn’t a strong feeling; it’s more like an absence of feeling…a surrender to a daily routine, a surrender to things that need to be done – a certain blandness- a state in which it’s very easy to function, it’s very easy to go about your routine, and people who are forced for one reason or another into a fairly restricted compass of social movement and communication are really quite capable of doing that for a long time, but then experiencing things with other people becomes a luxury, an oddity, an exceptional, heightened state of being. Then in this publication my father expresses the converse. I have felt lonely more times when people are around then when I have been on my own...Many times I can be with a group of people whose outlook on life, aspirations, beliefs, are so different from what I experience as reality that I just do not feel any connection with them. For me it has a different significance, I would say that it has an almost constant presence. It being a persistent and unwieldy thing- not linked to cause or effect. That stems mainly from me not feeling connected to something in myself, as though I am not really present, there is an unreality to what surrounds me, a feeling that nothing matters. These sensations, of course, travel in waves and there have been times in the company of my brothers perhaps, or a lover who I can talk to for hours, that some precarious and precious connection has been established with the world. Or perhaps, when I find a great book (one that has somehow articulated all my half gestated thoughts) that I feel very wonderfully and secretly connected to the thoughts of others.
2Thesewordshavebeentakenfromthepoem‘WithMoonLanguage’byHafiz
Amongst other things I can feel ashamed at not enjoying life (like it can feel that others do) and losing the desire to connect, losing desire at all, and in this state of mind, it feels that wanting and needing are privileges people don't realise they have. Feelings such as these can create self-fulfilling loops of negativity in ones life, because the shame that can accompany loneliness further isolates the individual, as sociologist Brene Brown explains, many people hide their vulnerability as they secretly feel that: There is something about me that if other people see it, I won’t be worthy of connection.3 Alone, Together . In Conversation and Thought privileges these strange and awkward feelings, but it by no means is exclusively a study of melancholy and despair. The term loneliness implies a lack, but its cousin ‘solitude’, carries with it a sense of serenity that one can feel when apart from the pressures of interaction and our participants have the opportunity to express a wide variance of feeling. We hope also that reading or hearing something intimate and true from another person can bring comfort and the soothing balm of a shared struggle with experience. There is, of course the risk that our project will be accused of being dangerously sentimental, by indulging the emotional preoccupations and navel gazing of our community. There is something significantly different however, in the culmination of many voices as opposed to the dictatorship of the ‘Artists’ voice, which can so often be heard holding forth on the state of their emotional well-being (hear I count myself complicit). By collecting the inner monologues of many we are provided with a constantly moving set of thoughts, ideas and images, with one individual canceling out the supremacy of another opinion with their own and so forth. The potential for a broad range of response and expression is what makes this project compelling. I imagine that the final tabulation of our interviews will display an interesting set of likenesses and differences, as we witness how others thoughts both intersect and diverge from our own. . In response to our final question What is the one question you would most like to ask others? We have had two different responses that I think display this potential for diversity quite sweetly. One interviewee wanted to know:
3TEDtalkbyBreneBrown‘ThePowerofVulnerability.’
Whether others feel as though there is a true, undeniable sense of sadness deep inside, that they feel, maybe not all the time, but it is there and that they might live and be happy and have fun, but there is some…. I feel as though there is just so much pain that people feel and I can’t understand how people can’t feel sad, because to me anyway, despite all the good things, there is just so much to feel sad about, even without living in poverty, despite how lucky and privileged I am, I feel so much sadness deep down and so I guess sometimes I wonder whether everyone has that or we all kind of pretend we don’t or decide not to address or live by that feeling because it’s too hard to and you just won’t be able to get a job or get out of bed or be productive or try to make the sad, bad things go away if you hold onto the sadness every single moment of the day. That’s something that lingers around and I wonder whether everyone has it deep down or even would admit that they have it even if I asked…. Whilst another’s response spoke to a similar sentiment, but came from a very different angle, wanting to know, How do you pursue joy? Is it something that you value or is it something that you think is incidental? Is it integral, or is it happenstance? Do you think you are entitled to it? Is it a priority, or is it a coincidence? This publication compiles writing ‘around’ the topics we will be addressing with our 8 questions. Many of them are creative responses that respond indirectly to what we are asking. The writers describe connection vs. disconnection, and how one might experience an internal emotional world. In speaking of connection we must think also of the person in relation to their environment (other people and things and the space in which they move). We are grateful for all the people who have participated so far and to those that may in the future, for their gracious ramblings. The structure of these conversation means that often the interviewee must discover their answers as they speak them through. I think that not everyone knew what they thought until they spoke it– finding points and then diverging and then returning again. The audio responses to these questions will not be rehearsed and slick, there will be full of sprawling articulation. This is fine, we’re not hoping for perfection, only for sincerity. -Alanna Lorenzon
Story
Girl felt her grasp on her surroundings loosen every now and
then when moving things slipped in and out of her peripheral
vision- sometimes she saw, cats or darting mutant figures
peeping around corners of furniture and rooms, but when she
would turn her head to glimpse them they would disappear.
They were always black and fuzzed about their edges.
Sometimes the walls breathed in and out, and lights cast
brilliant streaks across her field of vision. She enjoyed
shutting her eyes after watching bright things, to see the
impressions they left. It was like Plato’s shadows in reverse.
Boy was the friend to whom she was closest. She wasn’t
sure exactly why this was, as he really did not have any
special qualities which set him apart from anyone else, yet
their bond was inexplicably strong, Often they would sit,
barely acknowledging each other in silence. Moments like
this were always recalled fondly by her, and she appreciated
not having always to speak to fill the gaps with him. He
seemed to know everything already, and it was useless and
damaging to break the space of nothingness between them.
Girl had a real problem with doing just this with other
friends. She was terrified of silence, and spoke as much as
she could so as not to let it infiltrate her social space, her
inner sanctum.
They were often bored and did not have much in common.
‘Well, why don’t we just mix it all together and see what
happens?’
A grin spread over Boys face before breaking into barking
laughter.
‘Ok. I’m up.’
Cutting lines felt good. Very good. The anticipation was so
strong as you carefully tipped the granules on to the table
and with the back of your ID, your stupid face staring up at
you grinning beginning the scrape scrape crush which meant
it was coming, it was coming.
Girl and Boy rarely ever came down. Girl liked to sing Boy a
song when he was trembling and on the verge of tears, the
day after the day after their last party. She would wrap her
arms around his neck, squeezing it towards her mouth and
softly sing ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, to find what they
were after, Jack was coming down and broke his crown and
Jill came tumbling after.’ After this she would kiss him on the
cheek in that way that made the slobbering smooch sound,
laugh hysterically and tell him everything was going to be ok,
fine, just fine, grand even. She could not be sad when they
were together.
That Feeling
Is sitting by one’s self watching a sunset being alone? Is sitting by one’s self watching a movie being alone? Is being by one’s self trying to do something that would be much easier if you had someone else to help you , is that being alone?
Not to me. For me, solitude is an enjoyable experience. Watching a sunset can be very inspiring and peace delivering. I split my sides laughing watching Peter Sellers for the for the first time in “A Shot in the Dark”, all by myself in a Melbourne cinema. Doing a difficult job by myself, once I succeed in finishing it, is quite uplifting and gives me a great feeling of achievement.
But I have felt lonely in the midst of a large group of people, all seeming to have great fun talking to each other. I have felt lonely at work, in the midst of my work companions. I have felt lonely sitting at my own dining table with my family. I have felt lonely more times when people are around then when I have been on my own, many many miles from the nearest human being, in the donga or the mountains or near a cliff by the sea.
For me, loneliness has been a feeling of not being able to connect with other people. So it usually takes people to make me feel lonely. Nature and her wild beauty has always been a comfort, a point of connection with my surroundings.
Many times I can be with a group of people whose outlook on life, aspirations, beliefs, are so different from what I experience as reality that I just do not feel any connection with them. I simply withdraw behind a mannikin smile and slowly sip whatever is in my glass, casting an eye furtively around to see where else I could be. Sometimes that can occur simply because my hearing is not so good, and in a room full of people the hubbub is such that I just cannot follow the conversation around me and I am cut off from it, so I withdraw. You can ask people to repeat themselves or talk more loudly only so many times!
Loneliness is just not that pleasant. The kind I described above, such as at a party, is just so-so. It happens, not a big deal. If it happens because people in the conversation just aren’t interested in your outlooks and ideas and carry on with a conversation that seems to me to be riding over what I had expressed, that is more lonely. When your values, those that are important to you, are cast
aside, when there is just no connection there and it comes from a conscious or at least semi-conscious decision of those around you, the loneliness is harsher. When young, I constantly felt lonely in my family because there never seemed to be anyone that was the slightest bit interested in what I thought or felt. I simply felt like a supernumerary. It became a way of life, a habit.
If I am watching a movie and am enjoying it very much, I very well may want to share that enjoyment. Then, if there is no one around, I do feel lonely and the enjoyment evaporates. The same happens in travel – I, for one, feel I want to share what interesting and beautiful sights I may see. Travel on my own is not that great – sharing my experiences with someone else is another world, a much more enjoyable world entirely. Interestingly, travel to out of the way places in nature is different – sitting alone on a mountain looking over the plains, enjoying the sight of a salt lake at sunset, brings great joy to me. The silence, the solitude, doesn’t need company. The nature of it is there always, whether there is a human witness to it or not. I definitely believe that if a tree falls down in the forest, it makes a sound!
So I guess loneliness, for me, comes from not being able to share my world, my experiences, my thoughts, with some else. That needs someone with whom I can empathise, and who can empathise with me. Someone whom I feel understands what I feel.
Loneliness can also come, I believe, from defensive systems one creates. To maintain my own identity and integrity through my childhood I created a strong, deep and high wall around myself to protect me from the knocks and arrows of the world in which I lived. But many years after, when trying to build a life and relationships, it took quite a while for me to realize that I was still inside that fortress I had built. Only now it had become a prison, keeping out people I would rather have inside its walls. I had been a good engineer…those walls are still in the process of being pulled down.
One of the times I felt most disconnected, most lonely, must have been the time that our home-business was going through extremely difficult times. I seemed to be spending a lot of time every day putting off creditors! And my kids were growing up and at that age where they were testing the boundaries around them and testing their parents. I had been brought up in a very firm,
traditional European family. Children did as they were told, were never disrespectful, were obedient, didn’t talk back! My kids were the opposite, or so it seemed to me. Both my wife and I had agreed that we would respect their thoughts and views and always allow them to query, ask, explore. Fine in theory, but it turned out very hard for me in fact. It was an emotional reaction, not a reasonable one. My wife seemed to have no trouble with it all, she just breezed through it. Mind you, her background had been much more liberal, at least compared to mine. The anger and resentment that resulted for me was very disturbing, and caused me to feel very inadequate and useless as a father. It caused me to feel very lonely, depressed, and I spent much of my day in my little room/office just sharing my life with the wall in front of me. As even my wife couldn’t appreciate how I was reacting to the situation, it seemed so unreasonable since the kids were actually growing up rather well, I did feel extremely lonely – no one else could understand what I was living through.
On the other hand, surely one of the times I felt most connected with others, was when I was attending a meditation teachers’ training course in Avoriaz, in the French Alps. We had single men and single ladies attending separate classes, and it had been going on for about 2 ½ months, day and evening, seven days a week. There was only occasional cross gender interaction. We had been in the “dungeon” all day, a large conference hall in the basement of the hotel, and exited the hall around sunset. There were about 900 men, and a similar number of ladies. The hall exit was a courtyard open to the sky, below ground level, with grassy sides around it and a stairway up to ground level. A large courtyard. By a coincidence, the ladies had just a little earlier finished their classes and had exited their hotel, just next door to ours, and were standing on the grass around the top of our courtyard. When they saw us exiting our hotel, they started singing “Amazing Grace” to us. It was just a magic moment, and soon we all joined in the song. It was a moment of feeling great unity, great love and connection with everyone around me, a beautiful moment I’ll never forget.
What would I like most to ask someone else? I guess I can’t really think of anything that I would feel would not be intrusive into their privacy – that doesn’t leave much unless it’s something superficial about their day, what book they read recently, how was lunch, how’s your mother if I know them better.
The only type of question I would feel would be worth asking would be one that made them look inside themselves more, think more about what they are doing, and thus would bring out something that could be of value to them. So I’ll try this question: Do You Feel You Are Getting As Much Out Of Yourself As You Think You Are Capable Of?”
ONE AND OTHER / ONEANOTHER
LOW DEFINITION / HIGH DEFINITION SELVES I wouldn’t usually like to question whether people choose to be lonely, as it is the very rhetoric that when directed my way has made me truly lonely if I wasn’t already. However, the frequently voiced notion that ‘we are never separate, never alone, even though we may tell ourselves that we are’ Rowe (1983) is one that troubles me, for despite my suspicion towards it, it is consoling. The statement implies that there is choice and thus hope, and simultaneously suggests that if we experience loneliness or separation then it is a false and self-made type that is therefore not as legitimate. The particular sharpness or softness we feel at the edge of ourselves and the beginning of our surroundings is fluid and variable. For me, it is blurry and soft in spaces where I have felt a sense of connection, and submit to that feeling. It will reverse though in the moment of separation - as I’m walking home from a party by myself, finishing a novel, or sleeping alone for the first time in awhile. As my consciousness begins to fall back into my body I then feel panic with how distant my recognition of my own self is. It seems wherever I was I have given someone part of me and they have given me a part of them and things have shifted inside and out. A possessive ownership takes hold in this fright and the newly imprinted influences are made to seep back out slowly, a release, or purging, like a couch returning to its natural state. It is done as a claim to property, a kind of dictatorship of the self where autonomy is the fundamental. It is a by product then that the world should appear as though there is a high definition between parts, and sometimes as if an outline is a blade. Of course, it could continue differently ‒ the panic in struggling to recognise yourself would only logically occur if you had a sense that there was such thing as natural state of yourself, and if so
that it required preservation. As Psychologist Dorothy Rowe (1983) further explains '..constantly we affecting other people, and other people are affecting us..' My belief in the original self could have been a delusional desire - it could be that I had been defined by the paint of externalities from the very beginning. The extension is that influence on the self does not only exist when people interact, but is a constant, inescapable happening. It is like an equation - the essence of your life; your breath connects you with everything else, you breathe in the breath of others, and they breathe in your breath. Therefore, if there is a you that exists then it exists in everything else as everything else does in you, and thus divisions cease to exist. It is consoling for its togetherness, but frightening for it dissolves the self and makes you powerless. My suspicion rests upon a nagging sense that a oneness of humanity and of everything else is a view that exists as a kind of necessary false consciousness. It’s a guilty admission, sort of like I am letting the team down or something, as though I called it out for not being a team or didn’t try hard enough to feel the connection. And yet this guilt is similar to the result of criticisms directed at people who do seem to 'choose' separation- that to not join in on the togetherness is to mean that you are led by an egotism, privilege or inherent dissocietal nature. I feel that there is a possible agenda behind the idea that there is a natural connectedness, and it is perhaps one that is necessary in that it makes people feel compassion for one another in the way that you 'look out for your own'. However, it is in opposition with the freedom to live in a self that is not constructed through ‘the internalization of external demands’ Fromm (1942). Pressure to integrate and feel togetherness is perhaps responsible for the plug that blocks individuals from truly realising themselves and this where a choice to be separate and as a result lonely exists with virtue. At night looking down from above there is the disorientating commonality in the dots of light glowing from our separate
dwellings and if you blur your eyes they will bleed together. You can even find pure consciousness on the highways as we together speed towards the same horizon - For now we may too be using a false consciousness to convince ourselves that we are separate yet if this is so then it is as necessary as belief in togetherness is - it is done in order to know ourselves, trust in the limitless inner landscape and ultimately create a togetherness that is exists alongside a foremost integrity to the true terrain of the self. -Lucy Berglund Fromm, E 1942 The Fear of Freedom, Routledge, London Rowe, D 1983 Depression: the way out of your prison, Routledge, London
Surface You live in a universe of spirits, they orbit each other at various velocities. You see them and you feel their ghostly touch on your arm. It makes your skin creep all over your body. Their surfaces come into contact with the hairs on your face. You get this sense of something massive and immanent in the world. Something that you can only see one layer of. The effects of you interact with the effects of them, but you have no control over either of these effects. You don’t know how you come across. You are in the middle of a you, and they are in the middle of an alien you compared to you, and there is some little or big discrepancy between the you and the you, a discrepancy which can’t really be fathomed, even if it’s small. You live connected to everything with your body and electrical systems. You are connected through a series of difficult mathematical equations with e in them, and also other things which I’m not really qualified to talk about. Your head hurts. Your head hurts when the ghosts speak to you and when they text you. You get all these messages that you don’t understand, the messages are in the language of inanimate objects. When you pick things up, you know like any medium-sized household object, you feel like that thing is picking you up, or is causing you to pick it up, or your general aesthetic is causing the ghost of a kettle to somehow move without your say-so. Everything is talking to you. You don’t like talking. You like sitting still, and being quiet. Think of me as your medium. Put me between yourself and the spirits and the ghosts and the touching. Put me between yourself and those outer things that disturb you so. Think of me as a buffer, like slow email. You can depend on my faulty connection and insufficient decryption service. -Katherine Riley
‘LOOK AT THE STARS, LOOK HOW THEY SHINE FOR YOU’
I would sneak off after dinner, leave the kitchen table with a mumbled
line about year eleven and homework and run down the cold hallway to my room. I would select a CD single, I had been buying a few lately, I think it was the fact that you didn’t have to commit to liking a band if you only had a single and therefore deny really liking them if teased by your friends. I would put the single on and sit cross-legged on the floor, lean against the door, rest my head back with my eyes closed and wait. I’d choose a single based on how many emotions I wanted rushing through me that night and it usually felt like I needed a lot.
I don’t know where they came from; they just sort of blossomed in me. I was feeling these things that I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling. Loneliness, heartache and a thick sadness went rolling around in my heart provoked by nothing other than some songs. I felt so keenly, there on the wooden flood boards of my bedroom, with absolutely no experience in any of these things. Nothing. At the time I didn’t think much of it. I just needed to do it. Needed to feel a complete gamut of emotions aimed at nothing in particular. It was on the floor there that my imagination ran nakedly through all the gut shivering possibilities of emotions. I made up scenarios of smashed hearts, loss and injustice. I would put my head onto my knees and feel my heart beating huge aching beats of pain to the lonesome tunes of Coldplay, Ben Harper or Ani DiFranco. I just borrowed from everyone else’s pain and adopted it for myself, shamelessly; I wanted to own some too. Perhaps I was just eager to grow up and have some feelings of my own, I was just testing out what I imagined it would feel like to have someone love you so much they said the stars shone for you. It was sort of like I was missing the fundamental reason for living. Everyone else was in on it, the older girls on the bus with names carved into their arms using a compass, the pimply faces staring wistfully out of the bus window. Whereas I felt I hadn’t even scratched the surface of the underground cave of emotional gold.
Skip to now when Discman’s are out and IPod’s are in, Coldplay is still in but my emotional desert is way out. The late 90’s songs have become like keys now and when I put them on something rumbles up from within me causing a tidal wave of teenage emotion. Because somewhere along the stumbling, bashful trail of life I actually learnt, for real, what those emotions are and what they are really made of. Moving out of home, falling in/out/in/out of love, getting drunk and arguing until I vomit, getting lost amongst the first year students, stumbling lost along city streets, making friends, making enemies, crashing my bike, having a one night stand, travelling through unknown places,
hiding from people I don’t want to talk to, being happier than ever before. It’s not like I don’t still listen to music that makes me emotional, it’s that now I actually know what those songs feel like for myself. Now when I listen to some songs sitting on the floor of my room I can understand the emotion that is super glued onto the melody or the lyrics and navigate through the sometimes treacherous sometimes blissful feelings that barrel around inside me. They attach onto my loneliness and make it grow, like some of those scenes in Fern Tree Gully with the skeletal oil monster sucking down polluted air to make it more powerful. But at least I have experienced those emotions for real and I’m not just stealing them from Chris Martin. That’s a good thing I think, it’s probably called growing up.
- Erin Kelly
Contributors:
Edward Gould: [email protected]
Alanna Lorenzon: [email protected] /
inamorebalancedway.blogspot.com
alannacelestelorenzon.wordpress.com
Kirsty Hulm: [email protected]/ www.kirstyhulm.wordpress.com
Laura Delaney: [email protected]
Vladimir Lorenzon: [email protected]
Lucy Berglund: [email protected]
Katherine Riley: [email protected]/ katherinerriley.tumblr.com
Erin Kelly: [email protected]
This project has been generously supported by The Janet Holmes a Court Artists Grant. “The Janet Holmes à Court Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and through the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council of the Arts.”
