Writings.

I have two ways of lying about my life. When I'm low, I scroll backward and watch it resolve into a story: crisis, break, growth, meaning. When I'm bored, I torch the story and call it reinvention. Both feel like escape. Both are escape.

Civilisations do it too. The West chose the arc: things get better. India chose the cycle: things come round again. I'm starting to think both are ways of not looking at what's actually happening.

The West built its world on one premise. You are fixed. A rational actor with stable preferences. A personality with traits. A citizen with rights. It works because it seals you. This is who you are. Now trade, vote, belong.

India says the opposite. You are not the body, not the mind, not the story. You are the thing that watches.

That sounds like liberation. It is, if you're safe enough to wear identity as a costume. When I say identity is fluid, I'm speaking from a body that was never in danger. Detachment has always come easier to the ones with someone else boiling their lentils.

So I have to be careful what I'm selling. Holding thirty-three million gods, twenty-two languages and a thousand selves in one breath is a gift. Pitch it as India's gift to the world and it turns into anaesthesia.

Meanwhile the West wants out of its own box. That's how Zen got packaged and sold back to Americans as mindfulness. The feeling of transcendence without the cost of it. A fluid self inside a very stable system. It doesn't work. I've tried it in both directions.

So the export isn't philosophy. It isn't products either. It's protocols. A protocol is a grammar, not a language. Think jazz: you learn the chord changes, then you make it up. Here are three.

1. Sthiti, dynamic, sthiti. Stable state, transformation, new stable state. Not progress. Metamorphosis. A company that doesn't grow. It molts.
2. Role, not essence. Engineer, parent, devotee. None of these is you. A job title that dissolves when you log off.
3. Rasa as reality. The world isn't true or false. It's flavoured. Judge a decision by the texture of life it makes, not the return. Disgust is as real as love. Build for both.

You don't lead with the Gita. You lead with a supply chain that doesn't break because it was designed for impermanence. A city plan that changes with the monsoon instead of in spite of it.

And it can't come from a state, or from "India." It has to come from the gaps. Between the startup and the village co-op. The diaspora artist and the farmer. A sangha that refuses to become a movement, because movements need leaders, leaders become hosts, and hosts become walls.

I tried to start one. We called it the Failure Lab. Rule one: Document the crack, not the vase. Rule two: The first person to speak is wrong. Rule three: If you feel like the host, you've already failed.

It fell apart in a week. Someone wanted a mission statement. Someone wanted a DAO. Half the room wanted to vote on the rules for voting.

We published the autopsy. It's the only thing we built that feels real.

Maybe that's the export. A trail of exits. Not minimalism, not maximalism. Scar tissue, where the wound and the healing turn out to be the same texture.

A mason once apologised to me for an uneven cement wall in my house. I told him to leave it. Not because I had a design philosophy. Because I needed one surface in my life to stop pretending.

That crack was the first honest line I'd seen in months.

If you read this and feel you understand it, I've failed. If you read it and feel the compass spinning, not sure whether you're the host or the guest, good.

We're not starting a movement. We're leaving the door unlocked.

I don't think of God as someone who listens, intervenes, forgives or plans. Those ideas collapse too fast into comfort, or fear, or a bigger version of me. They fail under pressure.

What I believe is stricter. And much less consoling.

God is the sum of all perspectives.

Not a master viewpoint above the others. The whole field in which every partial view arises, argues, overlaps and disappears.

I got there through the gyre. Two opposing forces spiralling through each other. Never cancelling, never resolving. One expands as the other contracts. Where the two cones cross, something holds for a moment. A self. A decision. A belief. A painting.

That crossing is where we live. Memory and possibility. Order and disruption. Belonging and truth. Every choice I make is a local resolution. Provisional. Costly.

Scale it up and nothing changes. Traditions and revolutions aren't enemies. They're the same two forces, bigger. What hardens, fractures. What fractures, organises. A person and a society are the same problem at different sizes.

So God isn't inside the gyre. Not one side of it. Not the point where they cross. God is all the gyres at once. The complete, unresolved simultaneity of every perspective.

That definition is precise enough to be uncomfortable. I've checked.

A God who is every standpoint can't have one. No preference, no intention, no morality, because any of those would exclude someone and break the definition. This God cannot choose. Cannot act. Cannot intervene.

It explains a lot. Anyone who claims to know God fully is one perspective mistaking itself for the whole. Religions harden, split and reverse because theology isn't revelation. It's autobiography under pressure.

It doesn't solve suffering. It refuses to. Loss is real. When a perspective ends, nothing is cosmically restored. A crossing simply stops.

So meaning doesn't come from above. It comes from responsibility at the crossing. Cruelty is wrong because it narrows the field. Care is right because it keeps the gyre open.

Certainty turns dangerous. Humility isn't a virtue. It's structural.

This God doesn't watch over me. It doesn't guarantee justice. It also doesn't lie.

I don't use it to escape. I use it to stay inside things without collapsing.

Everything else is human.

I didn't grow up with God as mystery. I grew up with God as authority.

God was the one even my parents deferred to. If my parents could be wrong, God couldn't be. You didn't argue. You aligned, or you stayed quiet.

My older brother Karthik made that authority visible. Scripture, philosophy, ritual. He spoke with confidence, and to a child confidence sounds like truth. God, intelligence and being right collapsed into one figure. He wasn't trying to dominate. But when someone in the house is that sure, everyone else feels stupid.

Then education took the whole thing apart. God didn't fade. God failed. A story with power, not truth. I wore that clarity like armour. I thought I'd outgrown something childish.

What I hadn't counted on was the residue.

Other people prayed and looked steadied. I felt locked out. God wasn't false anymore. God was unavailable.

Then my life broke, and the things that used to work stopped working.

William James showed up. Not as theory. As permission. He took experience seriously. He made it clear the yearning mattered. I hadn't rejected God because I didn't care. My mind refused to be dishonest while my body kept reaching.

Around then, my brother and I finally met properly. Not the one who knew and the one who didn't. Two people who'd lost their certainty, circling the same question from different sides. What is art. Why be alive.

We came up with something simple.

To be alive is to feel alive. To feel alive is to grow. To grow is to go beyond who you are.

It landed because it wasn't spiritual. It was practical.

God stopped being someone who knew better. God stopped being something I'd disproved. God became direction. The pull to outgrow whatever I'm stuck in.

Prayer changed with it. From asking for things, to asking for strength, to something harder. At some point asking felt wrong. What came out instead was readiness.

Bring it on.

No miracles. No guarantees. Just rooms changing when I change.

That's the only God I can stand by.

I am six. He walks in. The whole theatre stops breathing.

He flicks his hand. I flick mine. He jumps, and my body knows before I do.

That was Rajinikanth, my first god. Not in a temple. On a screen. I didn't pray to him. I took from him. The jump at six. The cooling glasses at ten. The pen at fourteen, held like a dare.

Every gesture I've ever made started as someone else's. That's how a self gets built.

So I've stopped asking which gods are real. I'm more interested in the gods we use. The ones we reach for before we've decided anything.

Listen to how a church fills up. Each person tells the story of how the miracle happened to them, so you go and pray hoping one happens to you. That's a feed. It was always a feed.

And the feed doesn't even need a miracle. Messi got the most comments on Instagram. The most likes went to an egg. For no reason at all. For the fuck of it. That's the reason currently running our generation.

Every other image is begging. I call them phantoms desperate for existence. Please use me. I want to be seen.

And I'm a supplier. I find images, rip them out of context, tear them up and make something new. Some days it feels like theft dressed up as process. When it works, I'm alive again.

Here's the part I'd rather leave out.

Someone once offered to sell me to the art world as a new god. I said: small g. I was joking. I wasn't.

The day my talk went live, I refreshed all day. Strangers loved me. Strangers eviscerated me. I hid under a blanket in Brooklyn.

I say I long for silence. I still watch your eyes while I speak.

That's a small god: someone who needs to be worshipped. Up close, fame is a mirror. You start mistaking the reflection for your face.

I've started to think prayer was never the asking. It was the attention. No promise it'll turn out well. Just faith that you'll show up, something will speak, and you'll listen to that and not all the bullshit.

Then there's Ganesha. The Ganesha of kitchens, from my grandmother's stories when the lights went out. I still draw him. I set out to make 108. Only when they call.

I make gods.
I kneel to some of them.
I'm still finding out which.

When we were very young, Karthik told me a secret. I was Krishna.

He was someone else, maybe Muruga. Kaesava was Ganesha. Later he said he was joking. Too late. I am Krishna, poda, I told everybody.

I was making fun of God, because I was God. It suited my temperament beautifully.

That's the first theology I remember. Not one god above the house. A house where every brother got to be one.

Hindu boy, Christian school, Muslim neighbourhood, Muslim best friend. Plurality wasn't an idea. It was the floor.

Where I come from there are thirty-three million gods. Need rain? Make a god. Need courage? Make a god. Gods weren't truth. They were tools.

Then I noticed it was about power. And God broke.

So now I make gods. The work is called 33,000,000 Gods, and it's ongoing. The number is made up. The gods are not.

The method came from Dutch still life. Painters put flowers from different seasons into one impossible bouquet. Nothing in it could've bloomed in the same month. In the painting it does, beautifully. That's how my mind works. Two things that can't both be true keep being true.

I've been told, generously, that my personality is a face of God. Beautiful. But no. It's such a multitude. It's the bouquet as a face.

I don't trust the gods that want to be the only one.

A crowd of gods on a wall is easy to love. In one body it's harder.

There were years I tried to become singular. Pick one version of me that would survive. It worked. It was also a kind of violence.

My brother has a charge against me, and it's fair. He says I skate across philosophies like a DJ. Oh, you're in a Vedanta phase.

Not like a DJ, I tell him. Like someone who lives it. I'll let Vedanta change how I act. Will I become a Vedantic? I don't know.

I call myself a personality artist. My life is the art. Some days that sounds like branding. A clever way to never commit to one thing long enough to master it.

Thirty-three million gods is also a very good way to never pay full price for one.

I know. I'm still making them.

Years after he made me Krishna, he said it again, grown up this time. He is a face of God. I am another. That's where "I am God" ended up. Not arrogance. Grace. I'm not there, you're not there, so let's go gracefully.

The number is made up. The gods are not.

Or the other way round.

Someone asked for a god painting the size of Guernica. My gallerist said: make it your god painting.

So I set out to paint the gods. Proper ones.

I couldn't.

I thought I had the method. The impossible bouquet: things that don't belong together, side by side. Cartoons, memes, historical figures. A harmonious, impossible beauty. On paper.

Then the canvas was twenty-six feet wide.

The moment I stand in front of a blank canvas, the room fills with voices. Will it be beautiful? Will they like it? Will they buy it? Will they think I've lost it?

When I don't stop myself, there's no plan. My hand has permission to be messy. To ruin it.

Donald Duck turned up. Then Rajinikanth. Then things I will not defend.

Somewhere in there, pink is having a heated conversation with Narasimha. Neither of them seems surprised.

I am.

Nobody in the painting minds who they're next to. The gods are fine. The only one overwhelmed is the painter.

Some days I hate the work. Some days the work hates me back. We have an arrangement.

You know the story. Arjuna asked Krishna to show him everything. Krishna did, and Arjuna begged him to stop.

For years I was sure I was the one doing the showing. Meant for something larger. I called it vision. Sometimes it was just avoidance.

The funny version: I am soooo many things at once. Some of them contradict each other. I have a habit of doing the exact opposite of what I used to do, which makes me impossible to explain simply.

The less funny version: I've been called too much for as long as I can remember. So I learned to hand people one face at a time.

I went and found a name for what Arjuna saw. Rudolf Otto: Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. A mystery that pulls you in and terrifies you. I can give you the Latin. That's the problem. My eloquence is camouflage. It's easier to offer a philosophy than to say: I'm overwhelmed.

So I've stopped handing out one face.

That's where the bouquet was wrong. I thought the crowd would come out as harmony. It came out honest.

The painting is called Vishwaroopa. It's twenty-six feet wide. You can't see it from one place.

Neither can I.

In February 2020 I said something to my father I didn't know I'd need.

"I want to do something I can stand by, Pa. Not something that looks good. Something I can stand by as a human being."

A month later, one phone call. A half-million-dollar commission, cancelled. Then lockdown. And under both, the real problem: my work had become predictable. Even to me.

I don't live through something and then paint it. I paint it, and that's how I live through it.

I stood in front of Guernica many times over ten years, wanting to add my perspective.

Someone once asked why I'd play with it at all. It's pain in its purest form. Because the world takes itself too seriously. Picasso included.

Picasso had one town, one afternoon, one enemy. One painting was enough. I didn't have that. So I kept restaging it. First for media and manipulation. Then for the Siri-ocene, the age when we ask a machine what's true. Then as La Liberté.

I painted her the size of his anyway. Everything I paint big is measured against it.

I have a habit I hate. I keep trying to make the painting beautiful. Not because it asks me to. I use beauty like a bandage, over the places I got too honest. There's a moment in every painting when a voice starts whispering: Fix it. Smooth it. Make it something they'll want to hang.

I rescue it too soon. Because I want it admired. Worse, because I want to be admired through it.

That's the trap with La Liberté. The easy version of her gets lifted out of the rubble. A hand from above. A god arriving on time. I didn't want a saviour. I wanted someone who doesn't flinch at the wreckage.

Courage is standing in the wound without explaining it. You'll notice I'm explaining.

From paper up

Under lockdown, with my brother as critic and Sonia keeping the record, I rebuilt from paper up. Pen, then watercolour, then oil, which I picked up for the first time in my life at forty. One body at a time. Hamlet. A drunk sunflower.

I thought I was learning a medium. I was learning to stand a figure up.

Later I had an idea for a mannequin that collapses and pulls itself back up on a rubber band. Still the best metaphor I have for the most important thing in life.

Standing is the boring part. Staying when the room isn't clapping.

Standing for what? That's where freedom gets complicated. Part of me has always wanted to give everything away, walk into the world and say, "I'm here to serve. What can I do?" I could sell it all tomorrow and paint what I want. But I'm cursed. I'm also ambitious.

There are two ways to be free. Go in any direction you want. Or stay in one place and explore every direction. Caged and free. Free and caged.

At Parsons, La Liberté de Guernica hangs beside Vishwaroopa as one wall. A woman standing on the rubble, and a god who is every body at once.

One is me learning to stand a figure up. The other is me asking where the figure ends.

Not at peace. Not at war. Still here.

In 2021 I became the first Indian to sell an NFT at Sotheby's, and the first human being to sell an orgasm as one.

Nobody remembers the first half of that sentence.

It started with my brother's question. If everything can be digitised, is everything for sale? I couldn't think of a single thing that couldn't be. So I asked: what's the craziest thing I could sell? The most intimate, personal, unsellable thing.

Of course my mind went to the orgasm. The French call it la petite mort. The little death.

It's where the mental and the physical melt into each other. A death that makes room for new life. So I wondered if I could have an erotic relationship with my own imagination. And whether that could be digitised too.

My orgasm, recorded as brainwaves, returned to oil on canvas by robots and my own hand. The one thing I thought should never be sold.

It sold. That's the joke and the point.

The catalogue opens with one line. There are some orgasms I regret and those that I don't.

Falling to my knees

I once wrote a chapter called I don't know the difference between desire and worship. I still can't answer it.

There are people I've loved
so much it felt like falling to my knees.
Not in ecstasy.
In surrender.
I made them gods
so I didn't have to admit
I was scared to be their equal.

Read it again and put a god where the people are. Nothing changes. Same knee.

Karthik once showed me Parvati on Shiva's lap, holding a mirror. "Actually, they're in coitus," he said, "but that's usually not depicted." I had just told him everything I do is to find out who I am. So where am I in that picture?

In coitus.

I'm joking. It's the union.

That's tantra, and it's very close to how I think. Opposites are only there to catch each other changing.

I am the wild erotic and the sacred celibate. Both. At once.

Which is why the orgasm couldn't stay a file. The digital world gives you a lot of bodylessness and not much presence. Presence needs a body. Being there. Looking someone in the eye. So it went back to oil. Back to a surface you can stand in front of.

Transcendence, it turns out, is getting back into the body.

People think I use language to explain. I don't. Eros, for me, is never the naked body. It's the sentence that brushes your inner thigh without breaking eye contact.

I should be careful with the title. We pray to the machine. I'm not sure I do. I make with it. That's different.

Maybe.

The old gods were tools, built because somebody needed something. We never stopped building them. We just stopped using the word. Now we call them platforms. Frameworks. Ideas worth spreading. I say that last one against myself.

I've called this the Siri-ocene. We ask a machine what is true. Not what's useful. What's true. That used to be a question you carried to a temple.

In 2021 I wrote down an idea for a work called That ALL shall be saved. The believer's promise that everyone will be saved. The crypto investor's faith that everything will be saved, forever, on the blockchain. Same promise. New altar.

So where am I in this? Not outside it.

Around 2016 I started working with noise functions and generative code, and something a machine made moved me the way a temple does. I didn't expect that. In 2018 Karthik and I co-curated Gradient Descent, one of the first exhibitions of AI art. Jumping into unknown water and figuring it out.

Here's the closest I've come to a vigil. Six, seven hours into the night. Three in the morning. Obsessed, waiting for it to come out. One early image showed me what jealousy could look like. I kept it as sacred, because I was really like, what the fuck?

But I wasn't waiting for an answer. I was waiting for a surprise. It's art education for me, man.

And it isn't that mysterious once you've sat with it long enough. It's a net thrown in different places. Ask for five and it's the same net. I can tell you the deviation between each one. Boil everything down to prompt engineering and you kill the connection to hope, and the future, and re-imagination.

Everyone's worried it will wipe out artists. At some level I don't give a fuck. Art isn't just an image.

The part I care about: the machine's compositions printed on cotton rag, then painted back into by hand. Usually an artist composes. Here the composition comes from somewhere else, and you work against it. I called it d-composition.

The machine offers. I disagree. We end up somewhere neither of us would have gone.

When we were naming that show, I heard myself say it out loud:

Do you still need me to finish you?

I still don't know who was speaking. Me to the print. The print to me. Some days I want the answer to be yes. That's the nearest I get to kneeling.

What still bothers me is the body. The machine's image is too dreamlike. It can't crack. It can't rot. I'd like an art that rots.

Or one that runs worship backwards. A tiny camera in the work that follows your eye and fades whatever you look at. Keep looking at something and it disappears.

Some meditate. Some pray. I build things I don't fully understand to find out who I am. Which is exactly what everyone is doing with the machine. Maybe the only difference is that I admit I built it.

I don't know yet.
Do you still need me?

Half my life in India, half in America. I'm not going to choose.

People hear that as logistics. For me it's closer to how I love. I don't choose between countries. I don't choose between gods. I've never been good at choosing between people. For a long time I thought that was greed. Maybe some of it is. But I've started to suspect it's one muscle, and it doesn't care what it's lifting.

In 2011 I made an iPad book called Pop-It. You shake it and the parents change. Two fathers. Two mothers. A mother and a father. The child stays the same.

I thought it was a book about families. It was. But look at it from the child's side. The figures above keep changing. The looking up doesn't. One god, then another.

Same love.

I come from a family of individuals. Nobody tries to be like anybody else. Raga is like Raga.

Funny, coming from a twin. Growing up nobody said, "Raghava, do this. Kaesava, do that." It was, "Let the twins come here." You're loved as one. You're known too well. Neither is the same as being considered.

One of my daughters once told me, very calmly, that she makes no promises. I said:

I'm not a demon. You can disagree. The best you can do is consider it. Just say, "I'm considering it." That's all I want.

I'm not a demon. I laughed when I heard it back. But it's most of what I believe about living next to other people's gods. Not tolerance, which is disagreement with its jaw clenched. Consideration. Hold my god for a minute. Give it back if you want.

My kids are better theologians than I am. One of them designed her dream house with four children in it: two robots, a human and a monkey. The robots needed a proper room. Can't they go in a closet, I asked. They don't have feelings. Then I heard myself:

Do we project feelings onto them, just because we make them look like us?

That's the question I keep asking about gods. I asked it to win an argument about a closet. I lost.

Another day, a rhyming game. Get into a feeling and sing it. What came out of me was a prayer:

Superman, He-Man, Spider-Man, come, make me the person that I want to become.

Three cartoon gods in one line, and nobody asked me to pick.

Bangalore. My father, Karthik and me. My father is explaining a line of Kamban. Then my brother starts reciting Kandhar Anubhuthi, the Tamil hymn to Murugan.

When he finished, I said: I've forgotten myself in you.

I don't know if I said it to my brother or to Murugan.

Same love.

I'm still considering it.

I asked an AI what it sees when it sees me. I told it to be brutally honest.

It said: a man who has built a lot of scaffolding around a wound. A man who makes everything about himself.

Half right.

There is a wound. I'm not going to argue with that.

I lost my house, my family and my career in the same season and started again with nothing. The toys I made for Jaya came out of that. So did the Guernica-scale paintings. It's on this website. Not buried. Not hinted at. On the same page as the Sotheby's line.

But I'm not less because there's a wound. I'm not diminished.

Somewhere we decided that if you show the wound, everything else must be a bandage over it. Five TED talks, a bandage. National Geographic, a bandage. That's the lazy reading. The wound isn't what I'm hiding. It's what I'm showing.

The second charge is the more interesting one. It's all about me.

Yes. It is.

The artist is about himself. I don't know another way in. I get to know the world by getting to know myself. That's not a confession. It's the method.

My mind is a mindfuck. I know that. So I hand it over, all of it, all the perspectives at once, and let you sit inside it. It's about me. It's about the people. It's about the process. All three, at the same time.

So yes, it's all about me. In the most honest way I know.

I was at Chris Anderson's house once. A journalist, a New York Times writer, I forget his name, was talking about selfishness. How relationships take you beyond the self. How he had come to realise this.

I asked him: are you going through a divorce?

Because that's what it sounded like. A man punishing himself for having been selfish, and calling the punishment wisdom.

I couldn't relate. I still can't.

I'm not going to apologise for having a self.

For years I was invited into TED's inner circle, with Malcolm Gladwell and the others, to meet speakers before they gave their talks. Conversation. Feedback. I heard Daniel Kahneman before he went on and told him what I thought.

I think I was in that room because I was the contrarian. The perspective no one else would bring to the table.

That's the same job this website does.

My whole career I've been trying to articulate three things. What others think of me. How I've been presented to the world. What I think of me.

They are not the same thing. For most of my life the first two were other people's job.

I present myself almost like a Banksy or a KAWS. The artist as his own presenter. Nobody standing between you and the work.

This website is me taking it back.

Not self-regard. Self-exposure. Not the self as a brand. The self as the material, opened up and put where you can see it.

What you see is up to you.

We were the only Hindu house in a Muslim neighbourhood.

Every Bakrid we cried when the goats became biryani. When the azaan rang we paid our respects. In the afternoon we crossed ourselves and went to chapel and prayed. At Diwali the whole neighbourhood was in our house.

Nobody called it anything. It was just how we lived.

Then I was ten, and the riots came. Hindu against Muslim, through the streets of the city.

My Muslim neighbours came to our door, the one Hindu house on the street, and said: if anyone comes here, we are going to move in and make sure you are all safe. No one will touch you.

The country was drawing a line straight through us. The people next door stood on it and refused.

Something in me never trusted the agreed-upon story after that. The whole city agreed on the line. The truth was the people who wouldn't draw it.

Five years later I watched Mani Ratnam's Bombay, and it moved me deeply.

I have carried a deep distrust of consensus reality ever since.

Plurality was never a theory for me. It was the floor. I didn't choose it. It was the air in the house, and then it was the people at the door.

I don't need to resolve any of this. The neighbours never resolved it. They just stood there and held it.

That's all I'm trying to do.

I have tried so hard to be just one thing. So hard.

Every time, I would look closely at the person who made me want it, some human god I had picked to model myself on. And the closer I looked, the more I could see their own contradictions. The single thing I was reaching for fell apart in my hands.

Every human god that inspired that transcendence fell apart.

There was never one thing to become. Everyone I tried to collapse into was already a crowd.

I used to call what I wanted transcendence. I don't any more. I meant transcending the limitations of the self, not leaving the self. Expanding what one self can hold.

For years I thought I was painting contradiction. I was painting capacity. How much one person can hold at once. And the one doing the holding is not one tidy thing either.

So I stopped trying to be reduced. Not as a principle. My body doesn't permit it. Letting someone else say what I am, letting myself shrink to one thing, feels like being disembodied. I can't stay in it.

I'm not saying this is true for every artist. I'm saying it about me.

Permission and validation are not the same thing. Permission is beautiful. You give it to yourself, by making sense of the inner critics and silencing them. Validation comes from the room.

When I operate from that self, the aware one, the one that gives itself permission, I expand. And when I expand I become a magnet. Things come to me. It is extremely attractive, and I know it.

The mistake I make is this. I take what came, the result, and I make it my identity. Not the energy that attracted it. Not the magnetism. The result.

Then it's the mind. It grabs the result as me before the slow part of me can catch it. It's not easy.

I'm not there. I'm getting there, consciously, through exactly this.

The looking. The claiming. The making. The exploring through claiming. The unclaiming. The non-judgment of the plurality. And what all of it does to its own energy.

My mind is a fast learner. My body is a slow learner.

The mind can learn through simulated experience, secondhand experience, a stand-in for the real thing. A book, somebody else's life, something it only imagined. The body can only learn through firsthand experience. It has to go through the thing, and that takes years.

This is why I can't only talk.

This is what I understood this morning. Turning an idea into a body is itself the act of the body learning the idea. The mind learns it in a second, but it stays secondhand until I make it into something. The making is the learning.

That's what the painting is. And the journaling, and the sketching, and the conversations. It's all the same act.

Even a decision. Any action. Any movement. What is making? It's movement.

And when the body has really learned the thing, the movement comes with grace. Nothing fighting itself. No excess force. The grace is how I know the body has learned. When it's still a wrench, I'm not there yet.

That is what the big paintings ask of your body. From a distance they are beautiful, chaotic, devotional, laborious. Come closer and you start noticing characters that don't belong together. They don't seem to have an issue with each other. I have that issue, and you encounter your own limitation. Then you step back, and somehow you see the painting holding. And that gives you some faith that I'm still held. Even if I'm broken.

I don't want that on a card beside the painting. I want your feet to do it.

If a stranger who has never heard of me does that walk without reading a word, it worked. If they need the text, it didn't. I can lose that one.