She sells sea shells..

Kate and I went to the seashore.

Sounds like play, but we were scouting for a new body of work we're messing with. Didn't even bring our bathing suits!



I know the last post was a bit vague, and I had originally intended to explain it more completely but then writing it felt a bit trite. I think private realisations are, well, private and when committed to writing, sort of stop making sense and are full of the truisms that tend to sound pretty stale.

Plus, I intentionally wanted to depersonalise this blog, but then I went back to Nerve and saw how some of the bareness in it really suited me and my strange exhibitionistic, manic ways.

Anyway. I don’t have to be such an absolutist about everything.

So, my crisis was typical, as were the realisations that came from it, but I’ll try to explain what felt like clarity and understanding.

I spend a lot of time seeking out beauty, love and self-betterment. They're some of the things that make me feel most alive. I suppose when any of them are off kilter, I go off kilter, add to this my sometimes impossibly high standards and I’m often caught in a rapturous struggle.

When I see the word BEAUTY written, I feel my heart flutter. My work gives me beauty -I get to become an expert in it, study it every day in multiple forms.
But I also see the uselessness of beauty -the stupid meaninglessness of it.
It’s this duality, my ambivalence, which at low points, tortures me. What I adore, what I seek, what makes my blood flow also makes my blood boil.

So my crisis was thinking that what I do is pointless, that the pursuit of beauty is a weak and soulless search, but then I was skipping through a friend’s digicam, someone who is far from a photographer, someone who is a self confessed anti-aesthete, but in among the bajillion snaps both of us would, on occasion, take pause because even in him, his “untrained” eye, he had the capacity to make beauty, every so often, there was an image that was constructed in such a way that it was empirically beautiful. That is when I understood, that was my moment of clarity. Not only are we all capable of creating immense beauty but when you experience it, you know it, you feel it, it shakes you and moves you and is evident. Understanding that made me see that beauty has a profound impact on humans, a positive, serious, real impact. And then I didn’t feel so pointless.

I think when you lose love, as I recently have, you lose a chunk of beauty and trying to be good seems like it wasn’t good enough.

Which leads me to the self-betterment stuff.

I spend a lot of time and money on it: therapy, muay Thai, Bikram, massages, acupuncture, chiropractic etc. I’m always trying really hard to be “good”, and feel really bad when I’m not. At the same time I get totally grossed out by the utter self-centeredness of all of it -there’s that freaking ambivalence again.

Anyway, somehow, I realised that since we don't know what is going to happen and since this is probably IT, and all we have is now, then our only job on this planet is to be the best we can be –cheesy, yes. The extension of that purpose is to cause a chain reaction of good things spilling forward from ourselves to the world. This is how I can come to terms with the what's-the-point-why-are-we-here thing.

I wish this didn’t sound so hokey.

I suppose what it all comes down to is attempting to live with integrity.

-Mils