idea entry: week 04: sept 23

word of the week: SOLITUDE
[Margin, By Huge. DavidMixner.com - Live From Hell's Kitchen. Web. 23 Sept. 2010. .]

quotes:
"The common definition of "solitude" is "the state of being alone." But the nature of solitude is complex, since one can be "alone" in the presence of another person. Solitude can encompasses a variety of states that may range from pleasurable to exceedingly painful. In the latter case, it is termed "loneliness". (Modell, 121)

"Even the word Utopia has fallen on bad times. A design can be dismissed peremptorily by calling it Utopian, which means, in plain language, unrealistic, impractical, and expensive." (Sommer, 146)

annotated source:
"Solitude is often equated with loneliness, but the two are poles apart. Only in deep solitude, when the mind becomes still, does the state of fullness exist. When solitude decreases, the mind tends to become extroverted, dependent upon its surroundings, living in crowded memories. When we are occupied with memories and anxieties, the present experiences lose their vividness. The mind becomes dull. Meaning-full communication is choked, and inwardly we feel agitated, restless, and in the extreme, lonely." (Mumbai, preface)

Everything is a cycle. You start from top and slide to bottom, then you turn and climb again. We go from one thing to the other, not knowing that it is one a preconditioning to go back to what we started with. Instead of "back tracking", we are circling back to point A, by taking another route.

summary:
My work looks to explore the nature of the mind when it seeks for solitude. When it becomes its own sort of company and entertainment and guidance. If you think about it, it does all those things. We never think about it that way, but our mind is consistently doing those things to help keep us sane. We are guaranteed solitude, can you imagine that, sleep, the time of the day designated to refresh our body and mind, to free it from other forces and let us look inward. We escape right there and then. When our own mind clouds up our being too much we seek diversion from the outer world, we let our thoughts fade away with distractions and busy our bodies with things we force ourselves to do, our "responsibilities" to the outer world is a way to get away from ourselves. I want to explore with my work the idea of escape the world to be alone with ourselves, to be our own kind of company. Our "beings" is like a rubber ball, ricocheting from the outer world, to our personal space, to be with ourselves, then projecting ourselves into other mediums of the world (books, television, nature, material goods, etc).