“Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an artist.”
– Austin Osman Spare

When I was younger my mom often said “everything you pay attention to grows”. However, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that until later…

I’m writing this text in an effort to explore deeper into the subject of my last entry. This time I would like to zoom in on the relation between reality and language.

Again, add salt if necessary and without further ado, let’s talk about meaning.

Language Hijacks Reality

Language alone can create meaning, but meaning can’t be distilled back into just language; it is more than the sum of its parts.

Meaningful language becomes a vessel for more information than the words alone because we are either recalling an experience or defining our relationship with the subject, both are experienced through more mental faculties than just through our neocortex (oversimplified: rational problem solving language skills).

The more vivid, the stronger the meaning we experience albeit potentially very biased seeing that the emotions are often the most vivid of them all.

When we engage often with an attached meaning, we build history with it, the connection becomes stronger and it starts to feel as part of the “thing” it is attached to, but also as part of ourselves, similar to the mechanism of any other type of relation(ship).

(time + attention = connection)

Belief Is a Tool

If you extrapolate this perspective on meaning onto the similarities it has with belief, one could argue that; Language is a building block for Meaning, Meaning is a building block for Belief, Belief is a building block for Perceived Reality which feeds back into language in the form of our personal narrative, and the cycle continues.

Etymologically the word “meaning” comes from the German verb “meinen” which could be translated into “to intend / have in mind”. And even in english you could easily switch out “you didn’t mean that, did you?” with “you didn’t intend to say that, did you?”.

Interestingly enough, the translation of the the word “meaning” into Dutch is; “Betekenis” which has its etymological roots in “Teken”, which traditionally meant ”Divine Sign” but is also related to the verb; “tekenen” which means “to draw”. I thought that was interesting when compared to the drawings of the reality cartographers from my last entry.

Self-Reprogramming Rituals

This brings me to the Symbols (or Sigils if you Will) I created for my latest body of work “The Art of Change”. They represent the intentions, concepts and therefore my meaning behind the songs.

Language alone can create meaning, but like I was saying before; the more vivid the context, the stronger the meaning. That’s why I wanted to create more than just the words, I needed symbols that represented the words to create another layer of meaning, and then I asked Funilab to help me create an even more vivid context by adding symbolic visual places where these intentions / concepts / meanings “live”.

Actually, all the details, from the sounds / genre of the songs, lyrics, roll-out content, social media captions; everything was an attempt to enrich the context of the meanings / intentions I wanted to instill within myself. To the point that writing this text is also part of that process.

What you worship will consume you, so choose wisely

Language, meaning, and belief are to me very important tools, imperative to my goal of becoming a more active participant in my personal growth. We live in a relational universe and our engagement with the world around us, including ourselves, is determinative for the way we experience it.

When I was younger my mom often said “everything you pay attention to grows”. However, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that until later…

DROELOE aka Vincent Rooijers

Droeloe aka Vincent Rooijers operates somewhere between ritual and glitch. Working across performance, text and music, he treats systems as temporary agreements and symbols as raw material.

Droeloe’s work is not interested in comfort or polite coherence. It leans toward friction, doubt and deliberate destabilization. Meaning is not fixed. It is negotiated, provoked and occasionally sabotaged.

His work (half music, half trapdoor) invites you in and then quietly removes the dancefloor.