What do you see when you close your eyes?

What is the color of the light that gets into your eyes?

PHOSPHENE: AN ART PROJECT

Scientifically, (stay with me), it is called phosphene, the light that you see when you close your eyes. Those brilliant hues of exploding abstraction that scatter your eyelids, the ones that defy logic and permit sight without any light.

But metaphorically, I think it’s called hope. Divine intervention of inspiration to continue on. Some shred of exploding light finds you in the dark and shows you something you had closed your eyes to.

Open them.

That is what artist José Parlá advocates in this video that I got sucked into last night where he speaks of his latest exhibit,“Phosphene”, asking the very questions I posed above and sending me into a carnival of thought.

This isn’t about his art. But it is about art.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

For, I’ve never been so interested in the concrete visuals of Parlá’s art as much as the abstract meaning that he explains are latent within each piece. I’m a sucker for an artist who will tell you the deeper meaning of their process, allowing you into their mind.

A lot of artists create things and then refuse to provide any sort or meaning to them. They are the most difficult to interview, the hardest to crack. They say that they don’t want to influence the way that you view it, or that, perhaps, there’s just no deeper meaning at all.

It’s sort of like that one kid in the back row of the English class who asks the teacher if the author really ever meant for that dining room table to symbolize heteronormative bourgeois culture’s oppressive nature, or if, perhaps, it was just a dining room table, invariably sending the teacher who has devoted his entire life to interrogating the very meaning of that table into a fit of existential despair.

I have seen the life drain from their eyes too many times.

THE MACBETH OF THE ART WORLD

To be fair, that kid always has at least some semblance of a point.

We can’t ever really know what the author intended and what we just wish that they intended for our own academically or personally indulgent purposes. But pointing this out in a college English class is sort of like whispering Macbeth in a theater. You just don’t do it. We will throw things at you if you do.

Why?

Because insisting that there is no deeper meaning to that dining room table is just a microcosmic way of insisting that there is no deeper meaning to anything.

I would hate to look at the world through eyes that saw nothing beyond the concrete. I wouldn’t recognize anything if I couldn’t feel it. If I couldn’t feel the child that I was souring through my mind every time I sat on the swing in front of my childhood home, if that swing was just a swing and not the thing that taught me to bend my knees when falling, I wouldn’t know anything.

And if the monkey bars were just atoms compressed into iron, and not the things that showed me how sometimes, holding on hurts more than letting go, what would I know? And if the way he smirked and pushed his glasses up the first time I looked at him from across the room did not mean that he would be accidentally telling me he loved me three years later in an empty parking lot, then what did anything ever mean?

What was any of it ever for?

POETRY & EXISTENTIALISM

I think of these lines from this poem by Angie Sijun Lou called “Jessica gives me a chill pill”, where she writes:

Jessica
has a forehead scar from
the deep end of a pool. I
ask Jessica what drowning
feels like and she says
not everything feels like
something else.

I look at every drop
of rain before it touches
ground...I'm coming out
as someone who loves
things unevenly, my theologies
strewn out in the dark
- read full version here

AND SHE SAYS

We all find ourselves experiencing things that feel so vast and unlike anything we have every been through that when asked what it feels like, it is all we can do to say not everything feels like something else. It’s one of my favorite lines ever. A declaration of the thing that art rages against.

But then the tone switches away from Jessica and into the narrator, the artist, who tells us that she looks at every drop of rain, that she loves things unevenly, and that her beliefs are nothing is not scattered throughout an abyss. She tells us that she is “coming out” as a person who cares in this way, suggesting that to care, to love, and to feel anything at all, have become secrets to be kept, something you need to have courage to expose. For caring is so often seen as too much.

Too embarrassing.

Apathy is a stain not easily scrubbed out.

TO LOVE THINGS UNEVENLY

I suppose the meandering point is that we are both Jessica and her lover, the one who maybe doesn’t believe in a deeper meaning, but also the one who tries to.

I try all of the time.

I love things unevenly, messily, chaotically. I go to class with bloodstains on my hands from massacring poems that probably never wanted to have that much meaning beaten out of them, bled out of them. I pace the cereal aisle with my eyes glazed over from staring at photography exhibits, stoned off of details extracted from camera angles and subject choices that the artist very well might not have intended to ever be a drug, but turned into one anyway.

It’s what colors the world in for me. It’s what makes the ground feel just a little bit lighter beneath my feet and the sky just a little bit more endless.

And we need that, don’t we?

Maybe like air to breathe.

Love, m.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)

GET ON THE LIST

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.