How we try to approximate life…

Art has long been a refuge, but not as we might imagine that to mean.

Backing to the North, oil on canvas

Awaiting the arrival of my post cataract surgery eyeglasses, balancing the blur against the wonder of again seeing in full color. Without the veil of dirty ivory lace that had been slowly and then more rapidly veiling my sight. Reading, writing, even…, well, pretty much everything but sleeping! Presents an added and unfamiliar set of difficulties. After a long life as a voracious reader I’ve had to ration my interest. It still amazes me how draining this all is.

This has had an effect on the frequency of my posts. But, until I’ve had a chance to see how a renewed visual acuity affects what I do and how I do it. For instance, it would be great to get back to painting…. I don’t know how much of my silence is a result of this personal impediment and how much of it stems from the mounting revelations of just how dire our shared conditions have become and threaten to continue to worsen at what may be an exponential rate over the coming months and years.

I’ve never felt the need to write, or say anything that is already being better expressed by others. If I can’t discover something that hasn’t been said I’d rather keep quiet. This isn’t out of some grand ambition to chase originality. It comes from long experience with a simple concept. Nothing new can be found if we insist on repeating what may have once been vital but is most likely now, in the ever-evolving moment, become nothing more than squawking. Complaint, can become a rut we fall into. One that has swallowed up many lives….

There’s plenty to complain about! A certain stock-taking is helpful, better than the maintenance and defense of denial that has become the status quo…. But, this tends to fall into the category of things that other people who are in a better position and have greater access to information than I do are already doing and don’t need me to act as a repeater. At least beyond the daily dips into social media where I do put some feeble and pitiful effort into keeping certain voices circulating and amassing a list of other voices I’d rather never hear from again. And so it goes, retweeting these and blocking those….

The things I have found the energy to write about energize me because they tend to lie at the intersection between what interests me because of who I am and what being me, I feel no one else is going to explore in the ways that matter to me. This dynamic was behind starting Horizons of Significance all those years ago and why I came to give it that particular name. We each have a sense of what is significant and we each must navigate from within the limits of our particular horizons at this point in time we call the present.

This current journal’s name shifts the emphasis from what appears on our horizons to what we may do to navigate within the confines of our present. Uncertainty, being the only healthy and useful kind of certainty, is what I see as what we need practice navigating.

I’ve begun this post with the intention to put down and reflect on something that came to me recently. Making Art we give a portion of our perceptual field the kind of import and significance that a “wild” creature gives to its entire perceptual field all of the time. We treat, what in regard to painting I’ve called the painting’s privileged visual field, the area within its borders, a significance that we don’t give “normal” perception unless we are in a life or death situation. We accept that everything that happens there, everything we do there, everything we perceive upon that surface; has a supreme significance. What happens there matters. It matters as much as anything can matter.

I’ve written about the way this gives us the freedom to work on trying things out without the same level of fear of consequences that would arise if we were “experimenting” broadly and with abandon within actual life. Within this chosen realm we “live by” the fatality of our consequences while not actually endangering anyone. My teacher, Jake Goldberg, always said that painting and drawing we can do anything we want and we’ll never kill anybody. He was referring to Richard Serra and the way he flirted with real danger in his sculpture, making pieces that might fall on someone. He was also reflecting on surviving the Holocaust as a child and being an atheist in a foxhole drafted to kill and/or be killed in Korea. In the eerie way that I found early on while I was heavily blocked and blind to my own self-destructive tendencies, I found myself making sculpture that cannot stand. That would hurt if they fell on you….

What’s coming to me now, based on this recent insight, is that for the entire existence of Life danger has been a constant presence and as ubiquitous as light and air. What civilization has done, and this is always trotted out as a supreme benefit, is to insulate us from immediate consequences. It has provided us with an illusion of safety. Within this illusion of safety our capacities for perception can easily atrophy. We are also prone to PTSD when that illusion is torn apart by some violent action, accident, force of nature, or human violence. Part of, if not all of the good people have found when thrown into war, is the way it provides a force-fed version of this kind of clarity….

For my own part, I cannot imagine putting the kind of efforts I’ve turned towards art and art-making if it were not for the scars I have from early incidents that tore apart my budding illusions of safety. I’ve never seen anyone speak of the compulsions of art-making arising from anything other than trauma.

How does all of this fit together?

It appears that there could be a connection between art-making and the consequences of the illusion of safety we live under in civilization. It’s an opportunity for a damaged psyche to begin to explore “other options.” This grows out of the damage done, but perhaps, more significantly, it grows out of having experienced the gap between the illusion and “reality.”

As we are currently living through this Era of Revelation while it’s becoming more and more difficult to maintain any of what we’re discovering to be a myriad of illusions that have bolstered and defended what now appears to be an insanely dangerous and totally indefensible network of basic assumptions; as we witness and fall victim to the end-game as institutions, the very Edifice of Thought itself that we inhabit, shows itself to be a fatal trap; in these circumstances we find ourselves unable to affect how events unfurl. No one in “power” has a clue, chasing their grand illusions and projecting their fears and reacting with ever increasing brutality as they attempt the impossible, trying to block every consequence and insist on the primacy of their Wills over reality.

Our condition is to be infantalized. We are like infants and young children suffering abuse and neglect, or worse, while unable to find our strength and act from a position of unclouded agency. It’s no wonder that in either case Art, particularly art-making, appears to provide some possibility of movement when every other outlet seems totally blocked.

A profound revelation unfolding around us today is the disabuse of the illusion of justifiable violence. I’ve been looking at the traps of justification for a while. The problem isn’t limited to violence except that violence seems to be the only action open to us that demands justification. That “lives” within the framework of choice and justification. No one has ever suffered from an outbreak of truly empathetic generosity. What always requires a justification, no matter how transparently false and blinkered it turns out to be, is resorting to violence. Nothing is more defended and hidden from the self than the deep motivations for any and all acts of violence.

Civilization, according to its myths, has brought us out of a Hobbsian “State of Nature,” a “dog-eats-dog” world of the uncivilized. Whose “Bar, Bar,” the gibberish of those without language the Greeks projected onto those they could not understand and who they then labeled “Barbarians.” Whose bearded faces needed to be shaved clean by a barber….

Then why is it that in extremis we find ourselves finally beginning to recognize that the only voices of sanity today are those indigenous few civilization has not managed to yet destroy and that our “leadership” is increasingly murderous and set upon discovering as many ways as possible to ensure that, in the words of Louis XVI, “Apres moi? Le Deluge.”

The indigenous, the uncivilized, as DMC would put it, are encumbered by illusions; but they do not have any illusions concerning a Willed desire for certainty and that such a path would bring anyone safety.

We’ve been finding that the only way to maintain or reintroduce vitality to art has been, for over a century at least, to seek out influences and involvement of “Primitive” people. Looking back it’s increasingly clear that at every opportunity “civilizing art” has always amounted to a scam. A way to put a price on vitality and give some middleman a chance to “make a killing…”

“And so it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

OK, here’s where the writing goes off the rails. Every expectation we have leads us to expect that after “laying out the problem,” it’s time to “propose solutions.”

I can’t do that. Not simply as a result of personal failure or incapacity. As we’ve been exploring here for more than a decade we face predicaments not problems. Starting right here with the linear expectation that whatever bothers us is a problem and demands a solution. The historic litany of Final Solutions has, as of yet, not disabused us of this notion.

There is no solving what we’ve got ourselves into. What we’ve inherited and exacerbated simply by our presence regardless of whether we’ve seen our selves as “Good Guys” or simply feel that whatever bothers us is enough justification for whatever atrocities can be set in motion “in our name.”

Years ago, when it was still easy enough to push my own mortality off into an indefinite Future™, I wrote that extinction and simply dying seem the same from the perspective of an individual. Either way, from that singular point of view, everything is gone.

What strikes me now is how this connects with the end game of the bunker mentality as laid out by old Louis XVI. There is a malevolence that demands that if “I” must go, then everything must go with me. This is the extreme Megalomaniac-ally Narcissistic position. This is Trump’s motivation. This is the root of his appeal.

It’s also what Genocide Joe demands. It’s what every “Western World Leader” is demanding. It’s what Musk and Zuck demand.

It’s also what we, anyone with access to what’s written here, demands. It’s what I must accept, I demand.

It’s what any “I” will always demand.

At my Master’s defense Jake and my other main teacher, Alan Coté, concluded that what I was trying to do was to “Transcend transcendence.” I’m not sure how seriously they meant this. It could have simply been an exasperation with a late-bloomer who still appeared like he would never “settle down….” It struck me at the time. It’s stuck with me, added to the list of exasperations turned my way over the intervening decades.

It’s only begun to make sense in the last dozen years. Of course, that’s exactly the way an insistence that we keep peeling the onion until all we’re left with is mush and blinding tears would look in 1983 to a pair of New York artists just inside the edge of that so-successful and self-satisfied world of marketed transgression. They had no way of knowing what we can now no longer avoid facing.

This has been the trajectory of history in these forty-odd years. The first blow, the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the eerie continuity of business-as-usual this epochal event was met with was still almost a decade away. That “downtown New York scene” was almost twenty years away from being another form of “collateral damage” when some aging skyscrapers and some “unfortunate fiscal discrepancies” needed to be liquidated in 2001….

It takes the agony of all these mounting revelations to get any of us to take any of this seriously. Especially, those who were wrapped up in trying to “change the world.” The reactionaries have always been comfortable within the bargains they make with deception and their alliance with the Big Lie. Their “self-defense” is always at the ready. They never lack justification….

This last third of this essay is being written on my second full day with new glasses. New glasses. New computer. New software. New peripheries…. The “necessities” of this life….

We all have our justifications.

The Hawk has its reasons. And so do the Grackles and Blue Jays and Crows when they harry the Harrier who has or will be raiding their nests.

We’ve conflated what we so readily accept to be “survival of the fittest,” even if not especially those who reject “Science!” and want to bring about their particular Theocracy. I keep coming back to this troubling concern that when we took our stories of what “Nature” was “supposed to be” and then applied them as justifications for how we could divide our own humanity between the so-called Predators and their rightful prey; we were making a grave and fundamental error.

There are whiffs of adolescence around the way this and every story of justification plays out. The budding and scary and increasingly powerful and uncontrollable Ego taking over and vanquishing the hard-won fragile equanimity of late childhood. The way sometime in the fifth or sixth or seventh grade we each came to the horrible realization that the whole thing. Everything we thought worked the way we thought it did no longer worked. What was coming was frightening. Also exhilarating and seductive.

As a culture, as a civilization, as the whole history of civilization has shown us; this has been where we’ve been stuck for thousands of years. What makes a wild seventeen year old scarier than a wild twelve year old? They are older, stronger, and yet, farther away from the memories of what had been true before while much more fully capable of self-defending the insistence of their now flagrant Ego.

The US has been that wild and uncontrollable teen for all its history. Founding itself on myths of self-justification. Has it ever really sat well that we’re here to uphold, “the Pursuit of Happiness?…”

I’ve spent the whole time since I encountered my first bully in the halls of Truro Central School in 1958 waiting, wishing, hoping, that I/we could grow up into a better world…. Sixty two years on we are still in what it took me another six years to discover, the horrors of the halls and bathrooms of an American high school. Only now besides the bullying and the doctrinaire violence those schools are frequently the scenes of mass-shootings and are daily the centers for the dissemination and distribution of crippling, killing disease. Every milestone of my youth, from Sputnik and the Berlin Wall. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The decade of assassinations that removed, just as surgically as the fall of a professionally demolished building, removed every one of the people who showed any possibility of a different path. Solar panels on the Whitehouse roof. Then, Morning in America…, well, you get the idea.

I’ve been waiting for the “grown-ups” to figure this thing out. At seventy two I still have my “elders” leading the “Free World!” We have two doddering homicidal maniacs vying for the chance to give us more of what they’ve always shown us they are capable of doing, “running” for the Presidency. The closest thing I have to a peer, at least by age cohort, in a leadership role is Putin. I can just imagine the Soviet upbringing he had and its parallels and rhymes with my own….

What I could never imagine and have always subconsciously and consciously resisted has been the kind of “success” any of those bastards has realized. The assassinations and the overdoses of the sixties and early seventies not only taught me the costs of “standing out” when it came to resisting the evils of the worship of Power. It also showed me the costs of embracing the Big Lie.

I grew up listening to personal reminiscences of WWII. Not only the horrors faced by men and women fighting against unrestrained Power, but also the costs to them of being thrown into the building and explosion of the endless war-machine whose initial justification was to “fight back!” Their stories all seem to have the same eerie, stuck-on coda, “And if it hadn’t been for the bomb….” Every one of them glazing over and repeating a mantra first dumped on them to gain their complicity in the horrors of the Nuclear Age.

It seemed so profound and so silly too when the Beatles appeared on TV bobbing their mop-tops and singing, “All you need is Love! Yeah! Yeah!”

And so, the victors along with “their” Nazis, spoils of war that appeared without any qualms in the highest ranks of business, research, diplomacy…. The same kinds of signs a survivor of childhood abuse has learned to recognize. That the best way to hide flagrant horror is to do it in the open masked only by brazen contempt for anyone who might object.

We have a Nazi problem. We’ve had one since the first sweaty little gatherings in German beer halls and Italian academia in the twenties. It’s gotten really bad and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it.

The following isn’t meant as a “solution.”

The reasons we have gotten to this point. A point at which everyone who isn’t at least on the verge of realizing our complicity; and the way everything we are allowed to do or say maintains this system and its hold over everyone is “part of the problem;” lies in our inability to recognize the depth of this corruption. There are no “Good Guys with a Gun” to “save us.” There are those who have been backed into the desperation of resistance and they deserve respect; but no new gathering of the Free World together to defeat the darkness can ever be expected to do anything but hasten our total destruction. The deadly farce of “An Alliance of the Willing” has brought us to the end of any such expectations. We are living out the tragedy this Hubris brought down upon us.

Every instinct developed during civilization demands that we divide things up and then create fantasies of how we will solve our difficulties. Whatever there was before these instincts dug their ruts into human psyches we can barely even imagine today. Even those among us who are closest to indigeny are the products of the trauma of Thought’s taking over the world.

Fatality…. The joke about “Death & Taxes” is that only one of them is truly unavoidable. Just ask Elon or Zuck!

There is something about the call to art-making…. Its connection, however vague, to living in the world of creatures Life has always been. Versus the fantasy of superiority civilization has held out as its “promise….”

I feel this combination of the vagueness of an unformed realization, the kind of hint that is the only route towards what can be grappled with and understood, along with the realization that “nailing down an idea” is itself a bad idea!

Navigating in a fog, the most important certainty we can acknowledge and must keep in mind is that we cannot see where we are. We cannot see what’s around us. We cannot see where we’re going. We cannot see what dangers await.

We can imagine…. But then, caught up in Thought’s defenses, we stop dealing with the fact of the fog….

This is the one certainty I have to maintain. I might as well stop trying to push beyond it.

We are in a fog. Everything is subject to fatality.

The rest is a form of trap. Let’s deal with where we are….