Plugging in to my life.

Every now and again I come across something that strikes me in my quiet place. Mainly it will be a poem, and I will feel enriched, sometimes startled, sometimes perturbed into reflection. The other day it was a visual wake up call, by an artist who I know nothing whatsoever about, who lives his or her day somewhere else in the world, who has a life completely unconnected to my own. But who moved me. These collages that I came across on Flicker stirred a moment for me, provoked me in to thinking about consciousness and memory and visual imagination. I like looking at images, I like producing images, and yet I know I have very little visual imagination. It is a deep regret of mine. When I read anything, I do not see images. From talking to friends (and others!) I know this is different from most of them. They form an image in their mind when they read a novel. I would love to have that capability but I just don’t. Perhaps that is why I get so delighted by artists painting pictures for me, it fills a hole in my own brain. Perhaps this artist did that for me here, he or she prodded a neuron in my brain that was able to complete a circuit so that I could access a feeling. Alot of the time I feel deprived of a sense of feeling, as though I go through the world in black and white, and every now and again the brain circuitry works and brings the world to colour. It’s the same with people, and lots of my friends don’t understand this about me, because they plug me in to that socket which enables me to appear like a real human being, they feel the sense of empathy that they arise in me. What I don’t like about myself is when I am disconnected, and the world appears more like a graphic novel, all black and white and two-dimensional, and ultimately, just a comic. So thanks to Toshiaki Uchida, because on some level you made my day come alive. I think the energy that is released by art is fundamental to people like me, it is one of the critical paths to empathy, which must be the founding stone to being part of the universe. Being human without empathy is being less than alive in any real sense. We can be as clever as we like as a species, but without empathy who can we tell our stories to and be heard in turn?