My Work Bo Joseph 1992 It is not control; it is release. It is finding the point where "will" disappears. It is taking what I know and define and pushing it back to the point where it defines itself. This is the process of abstraction. It is not about imposition, but convergence. This union must come by chance, by intuition, by faith. If union is meant to, it will occur. I cannot mean it to be, I can only look for it. When I lose my will, when I look and see, I discover that union is constant, union is abundant. It is everywhere. I must walk into the dark with faith—in complete trust—not with my hands outstretched in anticipation of the thing I am to discover, but with I my hands at my sides ready for the thing that may discover me. There is a channel connecting outside to inside. It is an opening. Something draws me to these things. I believe they are connected. In my effort to join them, they take on a new life—I intuit their relationships. One thing defines the next. The energy of this intent permeates the form. I am interested in what happens when I can forget what has transpired in a piece and work on it "blank"—combine seemingly disparate ways of thought. I find that they connect. Abstraction is a process of undefining so that things may define themselves. It is an effort to create an opening and push it wider and wider to encompass potentially any experience. The opening is like a shaft or corridor connecting my levels of consciousness. It allows me to act on terms specific to the experience, the freedom to exist. It always takes an absolute trust. I cannot anticipate what will unfold, what I will discover. I must relinquish control in order to make decisions, for things are not always what they seem. There are things we think we know that we really don’t know at all. In this arena those things familiar become strange, and those things strange become familiar. In order to see, we must free ourselves from the influence of the intellect. We often impose relationships rather than simply watch them emerge. We want to understand, to organize on a conscious level. So often we must stop thinking. Ironically, this is a passive act. I try to see with more than just my eyes, not see connected to convention, but freed in a multi-level realm of trust, perception, intuition, matter, experience. The clear experience of the new is a moment of paralysis. I am alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered me; everything I trust and everything I am used to is for a moment taken away; I stand in the midst of transition where I cannot remain standing. The new presence inside has entered my heart and has gone into the innermost chamber and is no longer even there—is already in my bloodstream. And I don’t know what it is. I could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet I have changed. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our looking, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own.(1) Most trust is superficial. It is not a trust in life, but in the things of life—things we know, or things we think we know—not in the open ended gulf of experience. We are impatient. We function by other people’s standards, according to fear. We lose our senses. We accommodate at the detriment of our self respect. The answer lies not in trusting things themselves, but in trusting the not-thing. We must trust in nothing-ness, in space, so that things remain vital. We must listen to the most quiet voice. I must continuously lose my self in order to discover. The best way to learn to see is by looking. Explaining creates bias. It is a matter of surrendering fears—fearing the absence of definition, which is one more thing to hide behind, to kid ourselves about our righteousness—it is a way through the unknown. How could we define the way we have not seen? Images do not have verbal definitions. You can only allude to what they do. The only way to grasp an image is to look, to embrace its means of expression. It is easy to hide behind definitions. They provide a constant, a rock to land on, a foothold, a shackle from which one hangs over the "nothingness" that perhaps was once trusted. How could something infinite have definition? We keep things from manifesting in ways beyond our grasp if we define. We presume to understand. If we trust continuous change—if we "rest in change"—we may share it. There are no coincidences from chance, only from knowing. (1) This paragraph is adapted from R. M. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.