In my update from County Cork I mentioned a process of mine called “the dip.”

The dip is the bringing together of many different materials that ordinarily would not be thrown into the same game.  It would be like taking athletes who normally play tennis, rugby, pingpong, and handball, and throwing them all into a space and saying, “Okay, let’s play the game!”

One of them might ask, “Where’s the goal post?”

Somebody else would say, “Where’s the table?”

And the answer is:  You have the talent; you have strengths that are known and unknown; just do it.

The dip is an exploratory laboratory that puts all of the materials’ strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncracies into the same plane.  I am a ringmaster, stirring them all up and watching them play.

It’s a very exciting, fascinating, scary, unpredictable place to be, but I think it mirrors the world that we live in.  From one day to the next, we don’t know whether we’re going to get killed or kissed.  We may be happy, we may be sad, but it’s all in the game.

In life we control very little.  We make the assumption that we control a lot.  That’s why we’re a very mad society.  My basic assumption is, I control very little; I know even less.

At 78, I can’t wait to get up and find out what the hell I just learned in my sleep!  I still have a long, long, long way to go, and I will die trying, but I love the game, I love the adventure, the inconsistency, and I absolutely love the outcome:  the coming together of all of these forces to make something unique and new, which may not be accepted by anybody but me, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

That’s what “the dip” is.

Matt