Downsurdity

Last month I had to write a new promotional blurb for the Surrealist Training Circus, the other creative child I care for these days. Like the terrible speller I am, I referred a number of times to the circus's choice to make spectacles at Bard College in response to the threat of Apocalypse as 'Upsurd'. My editor/boss/mentor Paul responded that, evocative and apt as this creative spelling was, it was incorrect. I cringed.

The circus, though, is definitely UPsurd. Though irrational (beyond rational?) in nature, working on it makes me feel empowered and optimistic, and it is designed to make all participants and spectators feel that way, too.

Most of my experience right now is not so UP, though, but also is not so emotionally neutral as to be called AB(surd). I am scared by most facts and tidbits of news, by the pile of trash I haul around, the overarching feeling that I am ending my schooling in to a petrifying moment to be alive, and that in my lifetime the planet will become only more unweildy and the urge to comprehend will only be more strong. I find the act of articulating this fear empowering, despite its inherent futility, because I am grasping at some sort of ownership, and as a consumer and a creator, ownership feels good. I can't catagorize this work as depressing. I choose to do my year's body of learning in to the messy, insular, impractical mode of Studio Arts. The work I am doing and the body of knowledge that informs it make me feel both gloom and lightness. It is that funny-depressingness that exists when I stumble on something that should only be funny if it is not actually depressing (real), but is depressing, shouldn't be funny . Whatever makes I or you feel this way a peice of one big, greater something. There is only one force that makes you laugh as you hold you head in your hands, and that is what I am feeling, drawing from, working for. It is DOWNSURD.