Everything to Nothing.

Guys, I think everyone should have a honeymoon, it's great for thinking! Reading the blog it looks like my thoughts share something in common with the route that Josch has investigated.

Thinking of the universe, I see as a starting point or a metaphor. Faced with the possibility of nothingness or for some no god, I’ve kept returning to how that thought makes me feel and how others may feel and what the reaction to this potential reality may be? And the implications of the self.

I think the shift in focus from the collective to the individual is a natural one for us following on from our work with the group and its threat to the individual's identity. These thoughts have had me twisting though.


Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (and Charlotte Cotton’s Words Without Pics) really tickled some thoughts...

“It can be incredibly effective when three people work at it like that” Norwegian Wood

This seemed really uncanny; 3 people in a deeply socio-physcological-philosophical situation, who together could face the world and understand themselves better together.

In the face of fear and ‘nothingness’ we each create a comfort or look for a state of reassurance that will protect us, strengthen us against potential ‘nothingness’. There is always ‘I and him’, ‘I and her’, ‘I and us’, ‘I and God’, ‘I and science’. Even ‘I and nothing’ is something, it has some kind of substance, if only blackness or the letters of the word that it forms. This ‘something’, whatever it is that we surround ourselves with, elements of society for instance, shapes the I or self. The ‘self’ seems like light; without it we would have no trees, no flowers or rocks as we know them, the ‘something’ throws light onto the self and forms our view of it. I guess it’s our mirror.

It seems to me that us, JocJonJosch is not too different to this; with the thought that we have nothing and that we may continue to have and be nothing we have decided that we are stronger and more assured together. Therefore we have something.


From “everything to nothing” Norwegian Wood

This statement immediately reminded me of the description one of those scientists (in the Discovery series I edited) gave for the birth of the universe, “from nothing to everything’. And it seemed curious to look at it in reverse.

It’s interesting that this ‘everything’ or ‘something’ can be so fragile. So even after constructing our ‘something’ / comfort we are still very fragile and can be pushed into ‘nothingness’. What I mean is that if you are open to believing the possibility of nothingness or that there is no god, then anything is possible at any time which has the potential of hugely powerful implications both good and bad.

This fragility that follows us unnoticed like our own shadow until it claims us unannounced, stalks us all. It occurred to me that JocJonJosch must have it’s own ‘shadow’ too. So what if we were to introduce this ‘shadow’, a potential element of fragility into our own work and directly into our group? What if we were to invite another person or artist to interfere and challenge us and our work (whether it’s with sound, physically, whatever...). How would our work, us as three individuals and us as a group respond?

Of course fragility is not normally purposefully introduced into life so there would have to be some acceptance of that pretext but anything beyond that invitation is unscheduled as much as possible.