She likes to delete her Twitter account every now and then. This page is immoral. The timestamps are links to the tweets. The links are probably dead by now if you're reading this after 2023.
All times are UTC+2.
10:52 Awake at 4AM once more against my will.
10:54 What is the difference between a ghost and an image? How are they different? How are they the same?
10:55 What is the difference between awake and asleep? Where is awareness? What is awareness?
10:59 Welcome to my blogspace. Now dramatically illustrated with more than 6000 full-color pictures.
11:03 I believed there was another world that would show itself to me in the smallest ways. I would hold myself as still as possible and make my eyes like toys eyes that don't move --and I would wait. I would wait for the things in the room to forget about me and begin to move.
11:05 My mood seemed to have a lot to do with it. I'd have to make myself very calm and very friendly. The way I would when I wanted a shy animal to come to me. I knew I had to be patient and willing to wait a long time.
11:06 I believed there was another world, but I only noticed it when it became harder to get to.
11:49 At the center of everything we call 'the arts' and children call 'play', is something which seems somehow alive. It's not alive in the way you and I are alive, but it's not dead. It's alive in the way our memory is alive. Alive in the way the ocean is, able to transport us.
11:50 Alive in a way that thinking is not, but experiencing is, made of both memory and imagination, this is the thing we mean by 'an image'.
11:51 Images are found in action between inside and outside.
11:53 Where are images found? When images come to us, where do they come from? Why do they exist?
11:55 Images will often manufacture a language of their own and converse in it entirely among themselves. They will communicate with each other by means of picture-writing, and will make up secret alphabets which they will use for correspondence with each other.
11:57 I believe images are the soul's immune system and transit system.
12:01 What is the past? Where is it located? What is it made of? Things that happened, things that didn't happen, both... Some scientists believe that the past doesn't exist. I think that the past might be alive inside of us, that we carry it with us. Our own memories, true and false.
12:02 When we imagine things we don't want to imagine, why can't we stop ourselves?
12:04 What is an experience? Is it something you have? Or something that has you?
12:05 Is being a child an experience? Do experiences require thinking? What becomes of an experience after it's been had? What form does it take? Image? Memories?
12:08 Where do we keep bad memories? Do we put them in containers? Did anything ever happen to you that makes you think of a story? Write the name of the story. Then write what happened to you.
12:10 What are we doing when we are looking? How do we store these invisible vibrations, and how do we call them out to speak to us? Do you see what you expect? Do you see what is already invisible?
12:12 It's just a shadow. Just a shadow when a car goes by. Just a shadow. Just a shadow. Just a shadow.
12:15 A lot of nights we slept in front of the TV. On TV though, no one lived like we did, not even in the commercials. But there were places where creatures like us could be found. There were certain songs on the radio.
12:17 There are happy childhoods and unhappy childhoods but most fall somewhere in-between. Swinging sometimes up, or dragging sometimes low. The TV seemed to stop the pendulum and for this I was grateful. Both misery and joy seemed to perish in its light.
12:20 But in certain songs and stories, joy and misery flourish. Four books and the radio became my map and compass.
12:22 Do memories have mass? Do they have motion? Do they have inertia? Why do we say "It came to me"? Why do we use the word "flood" when describing a sudden memory? Are memories pictures or secret doorways?
12:26 [Why / How / What] do we compose? Putting things together again, again. There is a balance, or way to remember, an urge towards composition. It plus you equals... Intensity? Reflection? Refraction? Color? Practical uses of all of the above?
12:31 Playing by ourselves is not playing alone. There is something brought alive during this play. When played with it seems to play back. No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to- Times when nothing played back.
12:31 Writers call it "writers block". For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.
12:35 Fairytales and myths often are about this very thing. They begin sometimes with this very situation: A dead kingdom. Its residents all turned to stone. It's a good way to say it, that something alive is gone.
12:35 Television eased the problem by presenting channels to an ever-lively world I could watch, though it couldn't watch me back. Not that it would see much if it could. A girl made of stone facing a flickering light. 45 years later a woman made of stone doing the same thing.
12:38 In a myth or a fairytale one doesn't restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can't be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done? Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure... or what seems like failure...
12:38 And then hopelessness, and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad that it's there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, that your kingdom isn't dead.
12:40 What is a monster? Where does it come from? Why are monsters in so many old stories? True or false: Wherever there are people, you will find stories of monsters? Why do we need them?
12:48 We never need monsters more than when we are children. I believe a lot of kids play with monsters in this way. We had something that really scared us, that seemed to have it out for us. A "something" we had to defend ourselves from in secret ways. I never talked about the Gorgon.
12:53 Kids like making marks that make shapes that make stories. Adults are scared to do this. Was there ever a time when you liked to draw? When did you stop? Why? When did we get scared? What scared us?
12:55 When did you first notice you were bad at something? And then what happened?
13:00 I tried so hard. I drew and erased with a sick feeling. There was no hidden talent. It looked horrible. I tore it up and felt scared. I carried my fear alone until another fear replaced it. What had I done that was so wrong? Nothing, really. Nothing that bad in the outside.
13:00 But on the inside, in the story-world I'd tried on the glass slipper and broke it. And it was my mom's glass slipper. And she got it from the Gorgon. I didn't draw for a long time after that. And no one noticed. And I was glad.
13:03 By 5th grade I knew who the best artists were in our class. The best writers. Out of 30 about 10 stood out and were good at something. The rest of us started wishing. I wish I could draw. I wish I could write. I wish I could sing. I wish I could play music. I wish I was funny.
13:03 By 5th grade most of us knew it was already too late.
13:05 Do you wish you could draw? What do you think it would be like? At first this thought was very exciting. I drew the telescope and drew the earth and a space ship. I drew one of the buttons. Suddenly I felt the picture flying off into space. The picture went faster and faster.
13:07 Contact the Being from Inner Space. Look + See. See + Look.
13:09 What is singing? Why is there singing? Is it just entertainment? Human beings everywhere sing to babies but they hardly recognize that babies are also singing right back. Singing comes before talking. What do u imagine being able to sing would feel like? What are u singing about?
13:11 If we spoke about these things instead of singing about them, what would be different about the experience?
13:15 By 6th grade I stopped doing ordinary things in front of people. It had been ordinary to sing, kids are singing all the time when they are little, but then something happens. It's not that I stopped singing. I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it.
13:15 I made sure I never did it accidentally. That thing we call "bursting into song". I'm so stupid 🎶 I'm an idiot 🎵 <<<"EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOU, YOU KNOW?" (I'm so stupid... I'm an idiot..._)
13:16 I believe this happens to most of us. We are still singing, but secretly and all alone. I also stopped dancing around or dancing in any way. This wasn't a decision. I couldn't dance in front of people if I wanted to. My body just froze up. My only feeling was embarrassment.
13:17 I quit my hula dancing lessons. People always laugh when I tell them I took hula very seriously as a child. But I did. I went to lessons twice a week for six years.
13:19 The lessons were taught at a community center near my house. I could walk to it. Our teacher taught traditional hula, an old style of dancing that had nothing to do with entertainment. I danced to ancient hawaiian chants and songs every tuesday and thursday after class.
13:22 No matter what disappeared from my life the TV was always there to take its place. Quit singing and dancing, but there was singing &dancing on the TV. Quit drawing &reading fairytales but there were pictures and stories on TV. I depended on TV. What else in my life was reliable?
13:24 If your kingdom has gone dark inside, if you are lost, if you have dropped your map and compass, if you are only 12 years old, and there is a light which flickers and speaks in a way that makes you forget these things-- You will go to it.
13:24 You will go to it willingly and turn to stone. What else can you do.
13:25 What makes something meaningful? Can something be meaningful even if we can't explain what the meaning is?
13:26 Why do vampires have no reflection? What causes "growing up"?
13:29 As a teen I started drawing again once I found out I could copy other peoples art and I was actually pretty decent at it. And I'm thankful for this because I was completely unable to draw anything on my own that I could stand. I especially liked to copy comics.
13:33 I kept copying pictures, and looking for more and more pictures to copy which got me going to the downtown library. I would print out pictures of pokemon on the library computer. You only got 15 minutes for your turn. It was 25 cents per page. But there was a lot of pokemon.
13:37 A few blocks west was the beginning of a long street of porno shops and bars. There was also a headshop. In the headshop were bootleg neil young albums and underground comics. If the mean hippie was working he would say "Adults only. You can read. Look at the sign. Goodbye man."
13:38 If some of the other younger people were at the counter I could go in. My future was something I was looking for. I went down that street looking for it. I went into that headshop looking for it. Scared but doing it anyways. I bought underground comics with my babysitting money.
13:45 I was liking the word "underground" for the headshop comic books. My mom would've lost her mind if she knew what they were. By then she wasn't looking my way much anymore. She never asked what I was reading. She never asked about my drawing either although I was drawing more&more
13:47 And I was writing a lot and reading a lot because these 3 things and music made steady moods I could rely on to get through the last years of living at home. I wanted a different life but I wasn't sure how to get it.
13:50 I wanted to escape. I was copying other people's lives and personalities, hair and clothes, table-manners , conversation-style, way of laughing, way of anything that was part of the future I wanted to be in. My drawings got sweeter, and stiffer.
13:50 I copied poems and song lyrics. I copied thoughts of others and tried to change my situation by copying myself into another world. And it worked. In a fairytale it wouldn't work, but in real life it did.
13:55 In a fairytale, a pompous, fragmented imitator would be a side-character who never makes it to the happy ending. But I escaped. I'm very artistic you know-- I read very hard books. I can copy anything into my own style. Copying is all I had done for so long...
13:58 I escaped and a few years later I met my teacher, the one who showed me how to work in a way that slowly changed everything. She barely spoke. It drove me crazy I wanted to know what she thought of my art. There wasn't a lot going on in my art but something was starting to happen
13:58 She taught a wa of writing she learned from Ira Progoff. It was a way of keeping a journal that made parts of my life come back so vividly I didn't top to think things out before I wrote them. In fact stopping to think about it stopped the experience.
13:58 It seems that thinking and experiencing are not the same thing.
14:04 The Saturday night fire at my elementary school. Portable 5 burns down. There is a bad smell for weeks. Old Mrs. Pattons house burns down. She's carried out screaming. The Black Cat lumber yard burns down. Someone is setting fires.
14:04 On the nights of the fires I ran outside in a mumuu and my grandmas shoes. I thought I looked very cute. Everyone came out of their houses to watch. It was the only time our neighborhood ever did anything together. I saw the new kid in his pjs smoking. My mom thought it was him.
14:04 It was not. His mom just let him smoke.
14:06 13:58 It seems that thinking and experiencing are not the same thing.
It's the difference between trying to remember and the sudden flood of memory that comes from a song or a smell or a certain slant of the light. Wait, did the school burn down before the lumber yard? Which is better? Which seems more believable?
14:06 Every time I smell burnt lumber that has gotten wet I come back to this night. I am there again completely.
14:09 What is an image? It's the pulltoy that takes you from 1 place to another. The capacity to roll seems to be what that way of working brings back. The ability to stay in motion. To be pulled by something. To follow it and stay behind it. I would remember and forget this for years.
14:12 THE 2 QUESTIONS GHOST: And what the fuck is that supposed to be? ARTIST: I don't know yet... T2QG: Then why the fuck are you wasting your time drawing it? Rule #1 if you don't know what it is, IT SUCKS. You suck. Get in the box.
14:15 THE 2 QUESTIONS GHOST: I toldja! You'll get it back when you can tell me what the fuck it is, and give me one good reason, BESIDES THE FACT THAT IT'S YOURS-- That I should give it back to you. Oh- and you suck. Hehe.
14:16 I don't steal anything from the girl but her mind.
14:17 STUPID 🚀 BRILLIANT 🚀 MORON 🚀 GENIUS 🚀
14:19 Wheres my money? Wheres my respect? Cute art makes me vomit! Ugly art make me puke!
Retweet ARTIST: Whats missing from my work? uh. Technical ability? uh.. uh. Story structure? Action poses? THE TWO QUESTIONS GHOST: WRONG! THAT was your 9999th guess! You have just one more left then you are ours forever. ARIST: I give up! I don't know! OK! T2Q GHOST: Who- WHO TOLD U?
Retweet To be able to stand NOT KNOWING long enough to LET something ALIVE TAKE SHAPE! Without The Two Questions so much as is possible. To all the kids who quit drawing... I hope they know they can come back!
14:22 I could go on trying to explain everything I learned and forgot and how I accidentally became an artist because of it. I couldn't have learned to teach without my students who helped me to become convinced of the aliveness of images, the aliveness we feel when experiencing them
14:24 They can raise the dead hours inside of us that nothing else can reach. Will you help them cross over?
14:33 We are not having the experience in order to make an image. We're making an image in order to have an experience. Toys play with us.
14:33 Looking for meaning 🆚 Letting something acquire meaning
14:35 DANCING: Falling in and out of the groove.
14:35 FLY AND TURN INVISIBLE (notsure how can make a living at this)
14:36 Activity should ideally do more than FUFILL PURPOSE. Activity should hopefully EVOLVE PURPOSE.
14:38 PLAYING: A kid who is never allowed to play will be 🔴 FINE or 🟢 (what is your best guess?)
14:39 Playing is not about knowing. Making things, making something into something else, something tells me this...
14:39 Wishing, regretting, swarming thoughts, a different state of mind.
14:41 Why bother? Don't bother? What is bothering? What part of us suffers from bothering? When we try to shut it out what are we shutting? What are we shutting it in with? It gets harder before it gets easier. Does a stinging feel stingy to a stingy soul?
14:44 What is the difference between unseen and unreal? What is the difference between a fake imaginary friend and a real imaginary friend? Do you have a friend no one else can see? A fake imaginary friend still feels like you. A real imaginary friend feels like someone else.
14:46 The things that were not strange until I went to school. When one world shut and never reopened. Another world opened and I walked in and I didn't look back for six centuries. Holding on to no one.
14:48 Limit time with space. A story that fills two pages exactly like the four panels of a newspaper comic strip.
14:52 Q: What is the worst thing we can do while trying to remember something? What is the worst thing we can do when we are trying to forget something? A: Try. Trying to remember and trying to forget don't seem to work. I wonder why...
14:54 Sometimes in order to remember we have to completely forget. Sometimes in order to forget we have to completely remember.
14:56 There are neighborhoods of images. Neighborhoods of things we have hated. Things we have broken. Things we have lost. And the opposite neighborhoods are all there, things and people we have loved, lucky things, things that turned out sort of all right.... Unremembered until...
14:57 Learning is not a trajectory but a slowly ascending spiral.
15:07 If you opened an old can of pork and beans and found a genie inside who said "Boy! Is it great to finally be out of that can!! Thank you! In exchange I would like to release you from your can!" Would that image make sense to you? Would you say "I'm in a can?"
15:07 If a genie offered to free you from a dull canned life, what would you say? "Can you make me rich?" --No. "Famous?" --No. "Really cute?" -No. "Well can I at least make a living from it" --Probably not. "Then what's the point?"
15:07 Would the feeling of aliveness be enough? A feeling of life being something worth living? "The point is... IN the can... or OUT of the can" Would you ask for time to think about it? 5 years: 10 years: 20: 30: I've got it! 💀⚱️: Out of the Can!