Rose Petal Installation, 2024, Oslo, Norway.
True story warning: if the anecdote of personal experience isn’t your favorite way of relating you will find your pupils at the back of your head here. If the strangeness of someone’s lived experience opens the possibility of discovering a detail, interests you, you’re in the right place. Either way, welcome to Le Lapin, share your thoughts, toss some coins in the technocratic version of a street performers coffin, cough cough ahem, Stripe, account. All feedback whether kind is fine and perhaps better than the annihilating non-echoic chamber of isolated thought. And if this internet vessel is really working as it’s claimed to be recovering every keystroke, then all can be transmuted in time whether machine or mankind.
While art doesn’t really have to offer an explanation to be so, here goes: I offered dried flower petals and documented their drifting outward from Aker Brygge in spring, as a sort of closure ritual to their blossoming. This action followed nearly 6 or 7 years after offering red roses to the Akerselva, as imagined in Incarner des Roses.
Some time after offering the white rose petals, I walked a normal route to Bygdøy Sjøbad to find roses driven into the sand along the shoreline. The tilting of the world feeling of wondering if someone or something was watching was always with me in life, and such events, related or unrelated, are but several patterns that have emerged throughout Time.
In a separate story, perhaps better left for another time but woven here: finding a baby doll atop a very deep screw in a stone…that took quite an effort during Easter-time to remove the screw, following the writing of officials and institutions in charge of public safety and the area to take it out...because someone could fall and hurt themselves…I eventually borrowed some pliers from a friend to remove the screw (even though I did not think I could) and celebrated with a swim at HUK after.
By the way, I don’t really believe in rituals, and often wonder if believing or not has anything to do with the seeming obvious fact that they (rituals) do something. Perhaps even if everything we do, does something to us and life we may or may never meet. Sort of like whether or not one believes in a higher power, or various concepts circulated about karma; maybe something exists that has the desire to keep life going.
So what does this all mean? While I don’t think I have any special powers on or over life itself even if I believe there are things about reality that are ineffable and that action made with care and attention or not-actions made with care and attention is still an action performing the ritual or belief of choice that does something to the formation of the future we have no clear picture about but maybe are experienced as deja vu as they pass through our sensory field.
So while I do not give much power to belief itself, it is my suspicion about beliefs and ideas that are continually met by miraculous experiences offered along my path…these things that just seem to occur, whether or not I have asked or prayed for it afford movement through some of the most unmovable experiences. When I pray, miraculous things do seem to increase, but I still cannot reduce such things to reason as that I asked or prayed and received- even if I hold the lack of abundance of meaning/not meaning in my mind at the same time. The evidence of being alive seems to be evidence enough of the inevitability life as art and the art of life living through me is the closest truth to uncover in this story.
These true stories create a strange surreal feeling if one imagines them as related or having significant meaning or outcomes, but can be also experienced as totally unrelated and merely chance. Either way, the encounter of experience remains just as mysterious to me, and so I am concerned by the impetus to choose either way: everything as magic or nothing as magic, no meaning and open meaning.
Further, I am concerned by someone else deciding for another the content of their interpretation, or mind, as evidenced by what I like to called Imagined Sciencing, which is not science at all…because to approach living as science would be to not draw a conclusion but continually test hypothesis.
This has to do with organization of relation to the concept of Nature and the current dominate hierarchy humans have placed themselves in relative to perceivable Nature, which is also related to the unperceived Nature.
For example, the sensitive one I am called to be by those around me felt the quieting of human activity during Covid as a sort of relief. I had personally thought of the word co-vid as meaning co-video or the coronal plane…which is the surface or front part of the body…and looking at the surface or image is not really taking into account the whole body or constitution of the image itself. So as we witnessed the animals coming back to live where was once their territory placed us in a reflective state I had ached for (quite actually) in my body.
The loss of biodiversity, such as laid out as a call for empathy and reevaluation of values in Call of Life, has a relation to the order humans continue to impose and are forcefully plunging ahead on with A.I…which is to claim a form of intelligence is THE intelligence, denying forms of sensitive intelligences that can be cultivated within each of us.
The quieting, as I would like to not name it but refer to the feeling I have long reached for, is a kind of knowing that is related with, but should not rely on the super structures and systems humans are imposing on themselves in a race for God-like status.
This is to look at but not name the difference between The Web That Has No Weaver and a Ideological Global Surveillance State. For it is in our state of wonder and curiosity we can continue to ask and receive answers that are unique to our interrelated way of life that can be more quietly and intrinsically directed instead of forced about as a corrosive loss of trust in the process of life itself.
The joke floating around these days relative to the organization of human behavior and the validation or invalidation of evidence or documentation suggests an imposition of another concept: karma. Karma is one of those fuzzy ideas to me that suggests a human can understand and direct their understanding to a direct outcome. And in this joke floating around: this difference between a theory, a conspiracy theory and a result in reality is supposedly measurable around 6 months.
Sages of the past might say Karma is just a fact of life, and humanity is waking up to realize the power of the mind. I question what we think we know Karma is or is not. For who says we are reaping what we have collectively sown? and how much does that chorus end up making itself true or not?
I, for one, cannot say anyplace I have experienced to be the same as the other, but have witnessed the similarizing of summarizing through economics. And that if this pattern of reducing and aiming to point canons of thought is true…then are humans really interested in inviting a globalist communism to being? As if we did not witness from history the bloodiest of harms done by collective thought? And if that kind of Karma is a thing, then perhaps we can look to the Nature again, as a force of energy movements inward and that self immolation actions are absolutely dangerous and plausible: albeit natural. Such as in Tabes…the digital arrangement of analogue images was not made to be illustrative, but at this time serves so:
This image was made during a time my body began to waste away. No one knows for sure why, but after several years of testing, doctors concluded I had been psychologically abused more than my body could handle. They said it was lucky I was disciplined and kept moving my body, trying to understand and going forward with life because others might have gotten cancer, taken the medicine, or died…but that somehow I was managing to go forward…could be a result of actions made out of of habit. I had insisted I loved and that was all that kept me going…loving my family, loving the person who I felt was related to this event, and searching for some kind of inner knowing/meaning and truth. Which is not to say that I really discovered THE TRUTH but that in the quieting of accepting what had happened, the emotional energy of experience was transmuted through me, and I survived and was afforded ways forward by trusting those I loved around me to continue through (meaning onward with life). It was not self nor group reliance alone, but a balance I wish all are afforded to experience. This opportunity for living I fear can be lost entirely if our value for understanding Nature is lost to a possession for dominance (of nature or each other).
So what are the differences that aid life and biodiversity instead of imposing extreme order? To examine what exactly it is we are looking at: the mind of the people around you? the conditions of living? Both and more because this post is about sharing strange coincidences, lived experiences, and inviting a living with an open question instead of drawing conclusions to be right or wrong about- and instead taking a moment to look at history because the patterns emerging still have time to be shifted.
And this leads me to this open question…this pattern (below) remains foreign to me. I’ve never found anything like it and no one I directly have met seems to know exactly where such a pattern came from. And if what we each do is create a mark in the fabric of time, then I am interested in the beauty of the fabric we can weave together…
And yes, percolsity really isn’t a word but one could imagine its meaning.
Thanks for reading Le Lapin.
mariammanart @ icloud . com
