Art Is The Proper Task Of Life: We are all emotional mannequins!

I want to write this down before it slips away. It's amazing how fast things slip away.

It's not so glamorous or cool to write much about hard times or bad moods. So I minimize that stuff, even though our living experiment over here in Europe has not always been smooth sailing.

But moods are funny things. One of the teachings of Buddhism is, basically, that you are not your moods. You are something more constant, more durable, and your moods pass over you and through you. In keeping with one of Buddhism's other great teachings, which is that nothing is permanent, you can sit back and watch with detachment and even amazement as moods come and go, knowing that each will surely fade away and be replaced by another.

I stumbled upon a short movie, which you can see HERE, which arrives at very much the same conclusion, although it gets there from a much more "Western" direction.

I like the metaphor linking moods to weather. Berlin winters are dreary, and this has been one of the dreariest on record.

But this week has been sunny! Yesterday I was working on my face sculptures at KAOS, things were going well, some great music came up on my device, and I was in such a good mood that I found myself trying to sing and dance and sculpt at the same time. Not long after, I left for the day. The sunset was beautiful. I climbed a bridge. I took photos. Berlin suddenly seemed amazing!

Sure enough, moods are funny things. It didn't take much... some sunlight and good music and a feeling of being engaged in my work, and the world was awesome.

Here is the room in which Christina and I are working at KAOS. You can see my two faces, approximately at the center.

Here is a photo of the river Spree, just near KAOS, taken from the bridge we cross to get there. KAOS is the red brick building just to the right of the white building that says Schrott-Ankauf, on the left bank. Note the huge gantry-style coal crane, loading a barge.

Here is the sunset, taken from atop the same bridge.

Here is possibly the best crane-Unimog I've ever seen. Christina saw the picture and fell in love with this vehicle, but remarked "The bed is so small, you couldn't really carry anything." And I said "Yeah, but you could drive to the top of Wheeler Peak in that thing!"

Here is a vast, abandoned, red-brick factory complex, not too far from KAOS. Amazing. I would love to poke around in there.

Back to emotions... I've always vaguely envied Spock for his limited range of emotion, and even at certain times tried to emulate him in his speech patterns. More recently Saga Noren comes to mind. (Her show, The Bridge, is probably the best TV we've watched in years.. highly recommended!) Her world seems simpler for her lack of emotion and connection with people. It certainly seemed to allow her to bring more focus to her work. Of course, envying aliens and emotionally incapacitated people is surely simplistic, and possibly even infantile, but still... A consciousness without the messiness and distraction of emotion does have a certain allure!

On the other hand, of course, most great art plays on emotion. I've talked about this before, on this here blog. It's the emotional stuff that hits you hard. In fact it was the emotional elements of The Bridge which made it so damn good. Almost all the work of the almighty Björk derives its strength from its raw emotion. Emotion drives much, if not most, of human behavior. So it must be good for something! And you know... dancing in the workshop was fucking awesome.

Anyway, these are just undirected musings on a huge topic, about which I am not an expert. The internet is full of articles, scholarly and otherwise, about emotion and consciousness and whether they are the adaptive results of evolution, or a comparatively useless byproduct of it.

Before I go... I picked up the mannequin for my new piece.

She's a frickin' Amazon. She's as tall as I am.

And I must say, it was worth the drive out to the store fixtures retailer, an hour east of Berlin. I was hoping to see a room full of mannequins and I was not disappointed. They had about a thousand of them, probably... and also bins and shelves and bins and shelves full of parts... heads, hands, legs, etc.