My name is Isaiah Diakité and i will attempt to articulate to you what DTHJOY is. i must warn you i cannot fully satisfy or encapsulate in totality all that is DTHJOY. i will not attempt such an endeavor in this excerpt. DTHJOY is not a destination or logical or linear or even a singular concept. DTHJOY to me is many things, a guiding philosophy, a creative concept, a way of perceiving life ,and yet, much more. DTHJOY is an evolutionary concept i have been discovering through the journey of life. An endlessly layered onion. i will attempt to articulate what i do know to satisfy our curiosity attempting to mold its ambiguous shape for us to begin to comprehend.
Rick Rubin, a very respected creative thinker helped detach my need for formulation and definition of DTHJOY. i have attempted for years to find the logic and definition in a linear fashion of DTHJOY as a whole. A quote from his book The Creative Act “Any framework, method, or label you impose on yourself is just as likely to be a limitation as an opening” This paradox’s intention has helped me begin to articulate DTHJOY.
So if we are not going to define the framework or label DTHJOY, i will at the very least refine through storytelling and reveal what i have learned from the concept of DTHJOY.
In the beginning DTHJOY started as an image that came to me while working at a coffeeshop. This is where my journey of DTHJOY started, as a tattoo i wanted to place on my chest. This image contained two skeletons sitting at a coffee bar, mid clink of their drinking glasses cheering as their body language exuded joy. Behind them a window that outlooked a cemetery with two headstones in sight. Etched on the headstones the word FLESH. i innately perceived the meaning of this image as two skeletons who had died to their flesh and yet are exuding joy together. That being the first visual concept of DTHJOY. A union of two contrasting experiences in death and joy. For years this image never left my mind. A visceral experience that never lost life and meaning, nor evading my five senses, no matter the dormancy of action.
i begin to try to define and articulate this image over the years, from a concept for a future clothing brand or a mantra, a philosophy, refusing to reduce the imagery to a cool tattoo concept.. DTHJOY took a life of its own that has survived years of dormancy. Eventually it made its way to the forefront of my mind as my journey of searching for meaning continued. i realized in hindsight, years later, this union of contrast reflected the philosophy of self. Suddenly it became much bigger than a creative brand, image or concept.
As i endeavored to unravel the onion of DTHJOY; i saw it reflected the very articulation of my life experiences as a whole to my story. Was this a philosophy for life, a template, or pattern of my life? Through trials of mental health, trauma, addiction i can easily perceive deaths fingerprints. i even believed i would die at twenty-eight. My life’s story was filtered through a dark lense through hindsight, to say the least. Yet as i found healing and sobriety, wholeness has reframed my perspective of life. Through DTHJOY i am now able to articulate a more balanced articulation of the life i experienced. i saw only experiences of “death” through loss, chaos, and dis-ease. i now have just begun to see and feel evidence of joy embedded in reflection. Until sobriety i had no sense of joy; until then there was no yin and yang, dark and light, nop experience showed contrast. i longed for joy despite settling for death.
Many nights, many days i spent perplexing on how to embrace joy as i experienced many forms of death. i read so so much. It is how i source knowledge as i simultaneously expand my inner creative world. One day i discovered Viktor Frankl as i scoured for bread crumbs to lead me to relief of this chronic and deeply internal existentialism. Viktor Frankl a holocaust survivor, a neurologist, and renowned psychiatrist wrote in his book Mans Search For Meaning. “ | remember, it seemed to me that | would die in the near future. In this critical situation, however, my concern was different from that of most of my comrades. Their question was, “Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.” The question he asks here, ultimately sustained him through an atrocity few could comprehend and few did survive. He explains his experience of this atrocity in the first half of his book; i recommend you give Mans Search For Meaning a read if you navigate moments of existentialism. Viktor illuminated to us that “meaning” is the uniting of both death and joy in every experience.
i took time today reflecting on past moments of chaos, of peace, of loss, of love, of longing, and fulfillment of right and wrong, of deaths and of joyous moments; i now see both “the letting go” and “the joy of process” interpreted as interdependent perspectives of each experience. Knowing this allows me to accept there is meaning to moments united by contrast. DTHJOY is a union, an interdependency of contrasts. Meaning to our questions, to our fears, to our endless mental reruns. Meaning in the unknowing of it all. If that means DTHJOY is a perspective, a way of being, i’ll let it be. DTHJOY is for you as much for me. So thank you Victor Frankl and Rick Rubin for guiding me through the difficulty of articulating an everchanging concept, DTHJOY.
“A Tree must abscind the fruit that itself must grow”
– In Union Isaiah Diakité