Measured Doses

Five Photos With Accompanying Prose

Grayscale in Gouache

Subtlety

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about subtlety, as in the subtle differences between words, or the subtleties that divide us as people. Not to be confused with nuance by the way, which has a slightly different meaning.

Conformity

Chalk

Some people would like to force us each to be just one single thing. One color. One flavor. A brand. We are easier to manage that way, predictable, we can be fit efficiently into crowded spaces with others. We can be marketed and marketed to.

Close

Knit

The truth is that no matter how ordered the rows, how careful the plan, we are - each and every one of us - a once-in-a-lifetime mess. No individual is a straight line (no matter how straight they hold their spine) we are all of us twisted into knots of where we have been and whoever’s strands we have become entangled with along the Way.

Paper Tigers

Twisted

And if you have found your place in the world, if you have found your “tribe” and built your redoubt against the incursions of the other… well, what now? The world outside still doesn’t look like you, nor you them, and now the differences that make you you are so folded and crushed within the new shape you have forced yourself into that no-one will ever see.

There Are No Synonyms In English

Work In Progress

I had a high school English teacher who had a sign on the wall that read: “there are no synonyms in English”. I hated him at the time, we fought about whether Kerouac was literature (you might be surprised at who took which side) and he tried to force me to edit a poem before I submitted it to a school wide competition. I refused, I am a stubborn cuss, and I won the damned competition despite that bastard, with my original work - a proud moment. Now I look back and I know that gentleman was one of the best teachers I had along the path… and his aphorism? Brilliant. Subtle. A universal truth about writing hidden in six perfect words.