Departure

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Dan: I'm older, and I'm much less friendly to fuckin' change. Al Swearengen: Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.

—Deadwood

The efficacy of life is held within the grip of memory. Without memory we and indeed everyone we know or have known do not exist. We spend our lives fighting against loss which is primarily fighting against the loss of memory. We manifest things—art, to hold onto the world which we live in. It is within this contentious dance with death that we manifest life.

The tenuous dialogue between memory and existence has grown even more difficult in the digital age. Ideas constructed within the macro world of paint, stone and pencil become much more liminal in the world of bits and bytes. Not only do we struggle with the relationship to digital art in how it’s displayed—computer monitors, televisions—but its preservation and continuation. Since the 1970’s the platform for music has gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to compact discs to purely digital storage and now, back again to vinyl. How is an artist to predict the format which will hold the memories and expressions of tomorrow? Who now owns a betamax machine or a cassette player? As difficult as it is to sell works of art on paper, vinyl or canvas, it becomes even harder to make a living from digital production. As we’ve witnessed with the near death of newspapers and the implosion of the record industry, digital media lacks the tactile semi-permanence of something hanging on your wall. A Bill Viola work requires a monitor whose own technology is shifting every year. Televisions have gone from cathode ray technology to LED in just a few decades. Imagine how we will view our digital creations in 20, 30 or 50 years from now.

What I’ve come to realize however, is that none of this matters. The act of creation must go beyond the desire to hold on and the need for remembering if it is to become universal. The work of Bill Viola isn’t dependent upon a television monitor, it’s dependent upon the themes of being human. One could imagine his work being acted out live or drawn as a graphic novel or written out as a poem. It is the works of art which transcend the grip of memory that ironically live on the longest in our collective recollections and cultural identity. Loss is a starting point not an ending. When we loose someone important to us we don’t also kill ourselves, despite the anguish and sorrow we feel. We inherently understand that living is the point even if we understand very little about how that actually comes to be or why it is we too will eventually die. The 1953 work Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg is a testament to the way art can transcend the confines of memory and become something else, something universal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen a de Kooning before or even if you know who de Kooning was and his importance in the art world. It is enough to understand that one artist erased the work of another. The act of destruction becomes an act of creation.

This year has seemingly become a meditation on death, loss, and memory in my life. Mortality took up a seat next to me in my favorite pub and asked me to buy her a drink. I didn’t invite her to sit next to me and frankly before a couple of years ago I didn’t even know her name let alone hang out with her, and yet here she is, now a permanent fixture on that bar stool. My resistance was, at first swift, because like everyone else, I saw death as a threat to life, a destroyer of memories. Her presence there, forced me to confront entropy in a way that I had always pretended to embrace and understand, but suddenly realized was a pretense. I had disguised fear in a cloak of creativity. Life it turns out is much more like Schrödinger's cat experiment than even I had cared to admit.

Memories are not a box of photographs or a fleeting glimpse in our minds of a time we lived in the past. They are biochemical constructs built from electrical impulses that are stimulated from interactions in the real world as a tool for navigating the challenges of being. Evolutionarily speaking, memories have aided homo sapiens by providing us the foundation to create analogies, make tools, and catalogue our world. Memory has extended our lifespans and allowed us to surpass all other creatures on earth in terms of our dominance as a species. And the way in which those biochemical impulses are leveraged is through creativity and that creativity works by first assailing the memories we have available to us and then seeing how they can be reconstructed in a new way. The collective memory of de Kooning is now the collective memory of Rauschenberg which is really the collective memory of humanity. The symbolic is the real because we are alive.

The exciting opportunities available in the digital realm are the ones that challenge our understanding of permanence not the ones which reinforce our desire for nostalgia, for remembering and memorial. The creative act is an act of destruction because entropy is a natural component of being alive and to embrace its reality is to embrace being. It is also an impossibility. Matter is a constant in the universe and although it desires a state of equilibrium it is a constant. Staring at the Erased de Kooning Drawing brings us closer to that knowledge of equilibrium and a little closer to understanding the nature of being.

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” ― Jean Baudrillard

Anarchy & Order

Musings on the state of beauty and the sublime.

“Beauty is your sure bet that desire, unmolested, is going to make you feel around. The Sublime is your failure to feel anything around the beautiful, knowing well it’s there.” —Faheem Haider

“Reports that say there's -- that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.” —Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense (2002)

We are living in a time filled with visions of the apocalypse while simultaneously denying its near eventuality. Climate change is upon us. Officially or not we’re firmly seated in the Anthropocene. We will not meet our demise by way of alien space craft, zombie invasions, thermonuclear war or even the Terminator. Instead we have started a war with the planet itself and that war will more than likely going to end poorly for the human race. The concept of the entire world’s climate changing, melting polar ice sheets, the release of trapped CO2 in the tundra and a shift in global weather patterns inevitably triggering irreversible changes is more than most human beings can wrap their minds around. This is the dilemma of beauty and the sublime.

The assassination of John Lennon in 1980 and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan precisely a month later, marked the end of an era in American renewal. Ideals bound in the sublime, freedom chief among them. For a time we used our post-war prosperity to grow the cultural infusion we received prior to the war from those fleeing fascism. Lennon, another expat who chose to live in New York, was a symbol of what a culture might achieve when holding a firm grasp on the sublime. Reagan on the other hand, a Hollywood fantasy, preferred the Norman Rockwell portrait to the Pollock landscape. To Reagan any notion of the sublime was to be feared and freedom lived firmly in the real, not the abstract. Of course, that real was grounded in the tradition of rich, white men. Since then we’ve seen an accelerating erosion of abstract ideas and a continual, exponential embrace of certainty. This has led to a rise in fundamentalism, absurdist political frames like Ayn Rand Libertarianism, and a fanatical adherence to antiquated, dangerous ideas guaranteed to solidify the onslaught of climate change.

Beauty sits firmly in the Now of desire. It is tactile, emotional and lives within the boundaries of the body and our biology. The sublime fractures the Now, leaving us fumbling in the dark for the certainty of beauty. This dynamic which makes both concepts more powerful and recognizable, has been consumed by fear. The shiny culture of corporate production and our desire for the outcomes of that production—Nike shoes, BMW cars, the latest Beyoncé album—is now what stands in for beauty. It’s a deception. It has no place in the Now, only in the future. In parallel to consumerist beauty, and its replacement of democratic freedom, lies our idea of technological beauty. American fundamentalists drive automobiles and use smartphones that require a level of technological sophistication far exceeding their understanding. Yet they deny science because the science that led to the technology that provides them their comfort requires an embrace of the sublime that terrifies them far more than the certainty of an angry god.

The cognitive dissonance between technology and religion is a failure of imagination. Art is failing us and as a result our imaginations a left to fester on memetic replications of layered ironies. The inside joke of regurgitated culture is the only idea persisted, with few exceptions. Our art isn’t telling any new stories. It offers no real form of beauty because it has no stomach for the sublime. Just as technology cannot exist without the pursuit of pure science, beauty cannot exist without the sublime. The unknown unknowns are critical in our dialectic as they lead to inquiries bound by deep imagination. Art production is bound by intellectual curiosity not by talent and right now we’re sorely lacking in intellectual-aesthetic curiosity. Artists aren’t interested in redefining art, they think art-making is simply burning down the house of aesthetics in and of itself. I’m specifically thinking of Richard Prince, Tracy Emin and a cadre of followers and mimickers who pretend at art-making because they offer no real dialogue between beauty and the sublime. Prince’s effete riffs on pulp fiction book covers and Marlboro ads took whatever integrity was left in Warhol’s dialogue and flattened it into a dull plane of aesthetic purgatory. The artists who followed like Emin, et. al. have merely punctuated the effort in a pedantic ballet of aesthetic scatology.

We need a new definition for beauty and aesthetics. We have long since outgrown Plato, Kant and yes, even Heidegger but we are left with no new outline. The sublime is narrowly defined by the fear of terror. The terror of 9/11 seemed sublime because our art has been so narrow, plastic and ironic for so long. There is nothing sublime about a president standing on rubble and encouraging people to get back out there and shop.

Our culture and our art is trapped in an adolescent understanding of beauty and the sublime. A true imagining of the sublime is to ponder what lies beyond the infinite, to be so overwhelmed by the breakdown of physicality and the Now, that we are paralyzed. We attach words to these experiences but they all fall woefully short—altered states, the uncanny, transcendence, the infinite—are all our weak attempts to add context to that which has none. The failing in this is its lack of recognition that the sublime is not ‘out there’ in the intangible ether, but lives inside all of us in the form of consciousness. The voice inside our head as we interact in the Now, fractures the nature of any form of tangible reality. As Daniel Dennett says,

“The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic revolution.”

Grasping the infinity of available ideas is what makes us human.

Viewing images of the Hubble telescope’s view of the cosmos is an aesthetic experience that marries beauty and the sublime. The images of giant gas clouds millions of light years across our galaxy can be seen as physically beautiful. Recognizing the origins and time/space dimensions of those gas clouds disrupts their aesthetic value and seats them in the sublime. Our cultural cult of personality teaches us that beauty is precious, pretentious, and idealistic. The art world’s reaction to this admiration of the plastic-pretty with classical ugliness. A didactic and equally immature response to the current realities of our world. Entering the realm of the sublime gives shape to beauty precisely because it suddenly becomes precious against the abandon of the former. Art isn’t a response to anything, when it works. At its best it provides us a slim grasp of the Now in order to allow access to the infinite. Robert Hughes said it best during the apex of Reaganism,

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”

Hots on for Nowhere

The moon and the stars out of order As the tide tends to ebb and sway The sun in my soul's sinking lower While the hope in my hands turns to clay I don't ask that my feet fall on clover I don't roam at opportunity's door Why don't you ask my advice, take it slower Then your story'd be your finest reward*

The intent of this blog has always been to give some context to contemporary art and cinema so that those who are unfamiliar with the devices and methods used by artists might scratch at the surface of a deeper truth. Today I am thinking of Warhol’s early mastery and its parallel to the state of our nation because a personal loss mirrors this larger idea and because as stated earlier, art can be a bridge between the intimate and the universal. It is not the loss itself, as much as the circumstances that led to it that bring me such frustration, anger and ultimately, understanding. To witness the dynamics of our broken American psyche at play on a very personal scale is truly difficult. 

Watching someone squander their life because they cannot comprehend the preciousness of it, is almost more painful than having them die. Their perpetual delusion of materialism was thought to make them happier. Their inextricable connection to immortality through their pursuit of such delusions ultimately cost them their life. What could doctors and medicine offer that a new purse or a shiny set of nails couldn’t? How could eating properly and exercising possibly measure up to a visit to the hair salon and a brand new iPhone? Why should one worry about protecting your children in settling your affairs after death if one is never going to die? These were the delusions of my mother who died recently. She carried them all through her life as long as I can remember. However, the finality of death has caught up to her despite her magical thinking and I’m hoping it might serve as a lesson for others in their living. 

We are a culture possessed by dreams of immortality and armageddon. We live at the outer limits of sustainability, persisting a dream of ever more, (and more still) all the while knowing in our heart of hearts that eventually the clock will run out on our unending consumptive cravings. Americans hold death firmly in the abstract, which is odd given our abhorrent reactions toward abstraction in general. It’s a shame really that Andy Warhol is not still alive as he might have been the one to invent For the Love of God, instead of Damian Hirst. It seems out of place for a Brit to have invented it, or shall I say, stolen the idea at least. A diamond encrusted human skull seems much more befitting of the cultural delusion persisted in America and American art. Warhol’s success after the Campbell’s soup cans was solidified with his recognition of our American duality in one of his few inspired moments, Silver Car Crash. The large silkscreened canvases of hideous car crashes didn’t just echo the appropriated newspaper spaces of Jasper Johns but elevated them to a confluence of Johns work and Pollocks. The 70 some paintings Warhol created in 1963 to 1964 often referred to as his Death and Destruction Series leveraged imagery using photographs of gruesome car crashes, electric chairs, and suicides. This was Warhol’s apex and he would never make work this good again.

It is not enough to make the viewer aware of death, horror and tragedy, an artist needs to couch that realization in the cultural zeitgeist. What makes Warhol’s Car Crash paintings so good is not what you see, but what you don’t see. The two paneled paintings are nearly 9 feet tall and 13.5 feet wide—monumental scale. In the Car Crash paintings, Warhol depicts what Sartre referred to as the For-itself itself, that hoped for synthesis of being and nothingness. The idea that through art and the allegiance of beauty and death, one could find a cohesive consciousness, a bond if you will, between one’s imagined being and the reality of living. Warhol’s diptychs present themselves in art historical reference as a new kind of religious iconography depicting the union between acknowledging the inevitability of death and the obliqueness of oblivion united in the marriage of aesthetic truth. Here Warhol was informing us of a pathway America was on that showed how we might hold the contradiction of our own consumptive powers in balance with a greater truth, an almost holy other. No doubt his catholic upbringing paired with his own blasphemous lifestyle, must have contributed to his awareness of living contradictions, at least subconsciously. The coldness and mechanization of the silkscreen as a riff on mechanical reproduction was blended with bright colors or silver paint demonstrating our tendency toward celebrity and advertising, something Warhol knew a great deal about. This was the American dream of having it all. America was inventive, powerful, and vulgar in its tastes and yet we could produce great genius, art and land men on the moon (although not at the time of these paintings). 

Unfortunately, Warhol’s fantasy which was America’s fantasy was just that, false. Sustaining the duality has cost us dearly as we are slowly seeing our status on the world stage diminished and our economic model collapsing, whether we want to admit it or not. The fictive model of eternal ever greater consumption as aesthetic ideal has congealed into a self-replicating ironic loop of ever more crass, unimaginative pathos. America is an impotent giant torn between 21st century possibilities and 6th century conservatism. Our consumptive power has become a virus that now eats the young of America, consuming their potential and our hope for any form of real future democracy by fixing their gaze upon corporate brands rather than citizenship. It turns out the right-hand panels of Warhol’s work, the one’s mirroring the void turned out to be the more powerful. We lost our sense of balance because we lost our ability to hold those two ideas—death and being—as an ideal. Our denial of death as a concept through worship of celebrity iconography, and blind consumption have left us ontologically impotent. 

I am not a believer in the afterlife. I do not believe in reincarnation or heaven or whatever you want to call it. I believe we are all born of stardust and end as stardust. Matter is perpetual as far as we know it and infinite in its own right. Believing in this infinity has given me clarity and purpose about my own life. It humbles me and it has allowed me to understand things on both a macroscopic and microscopic level. I am susceptible to desire and consumption as much as the next person from time to time, but I do not fear death. I love whatever sense of consciousness I hold in this moment as I write these words but I know in many respects it is a kind of illusion that given enough weight can fool us into believing in our own immortality. Warhol’s Crash paintings must live as a diptych because the panel that represents the void is the true reminder of death, not the hideous filmstrip silkscreen of the car crash itself. Tragedy, happiness, sadness and all of the emotions must be held in check by the understanding that we all die. Seeing death, especially our own death and holding that image clearly, without fear, gives us a presence to make wiser choices about living. Consumption becomes less important when you realize you have only so many days on this earth in your current conscious form. 

Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) will always hold a lasting impression on me, not merely because of its brilliant portrayal of American duality held in check, but because it was painted in the year of my birth. It is an iconic gesture that I can hold as both a universal symbol and a personal one. It reminds me that no amount of money or things can replace my health or ability to share my creativity with the world. Paintings are an aesthetic mirror held up to our culture that shows a way toward balance. I may now be an orphan at 50, but the lesson I choose to take from this loss is to hold steadfast in my acceptance of death and to live and love as much as I can until I make my way back to stardust. 

R.I.P. Diana Dowd Greene, 1941 - 2014

* Hots on for Nowhere, Page/Plant, 1975 - off the album Presence by Led Zeppelin.

The Bleakness That Bonds Us

I am a child of Watergate. When I was in grade school in the 1970’s it was an all consuming subject, even among eleven and twelve year olds. My small town high school library made sure there was a special reserve section that dealt with the issues surrounding the continuing unfolding of the scandal and eventual disgraceful resignation of a president of the United States. As a adolescent the idea that a president would not only lie but manipulate the infrastructure of the U.S. government to win re-election was nearly impossible to swallow. My parents were products of the post WW II boom. They went to college to gain teaching degrees which our government paid for in order to promote a more robust democracy in the wake of the atrocities of fascism. It was a time of relative idealism despite the assignation of John F. Kennedy just three months after my birth and later Martin Luther King and his brother Bobby. It was a time of hope despite the insipid bombing of Cambodia, the knifing of a young man at Altamont during a Rolling Stones concert and the hideous plague rained down from the Manson family in L.A. The remnants of 1950’s America was still holding charge in small town America. I was taught even then, at that early age about civics, citizenry and the idea of a functional government. My father voted for Nixon, twice and my mother voted first for Humphrey than McGovern, but I was taught to respect differences because the vote is what enabled reconciliation. Republican government with democratic underpinnings was the greatest form of government known on Earth, and despite it’s faults, it was to be respected.

Then came Watergate. It was as if I learned that one of my uncles was a child molester or heroin dealer. I had no personal opinion about the president, but the mere fact that the leader of the free world could lie under oath and deceive on such a large scale was nearly impossible to comprehend. Today, that would be the bane of naivety and I would be laughed at out loud by nearly every school child with any remote sense of current affairs. We all sit and watch The Cobert Report or John Stewart’s comedy news and we take it in stride that our government is filled with idiots, charlatans and deceivers, but in the spring of 1974 the unfolding idea of that our president could be involved in orchestrating something as petty and foul as a break in of the Democratic National Headquarters seemed as reasonable as suggesting that aliens were living at Area 51 in Nevada. It was an odd time because the aftermath of the 60’s still came to bear and much of television was divided between the ostrich in the sand and confronting very directly, somewhat cynically and very much sarcastically the fact that all was not well with our society. All In The Family, Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, and Soul Train ran at the same time as The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie and American Bandstand. Children, even precocious 11 year olds weren’t capable of sorting out the cultural dissonance taking place at the time. Watergate, changed all that. It made real in a televised cultural way that our society was deeply corrupt at its core. There was no more room for a beautiful landscape of democracy that would self-correct. You knew, even then, there was no coming back from what was uncovered with Nixon’s dirty dealings. Sure, governments and centralized power are always prone to corruption, but what uncovered the deceit of Nixon was the fourth estate. Today there is no more fourth estate. Woodward and Bernstein would have been laid off by now.

I’m making this distinction between the fracture of a belief that I encountered in my youth back in 1973-75 and now because I think the monumental difference between the two eras is quite simply, back then there was a belief to begin with. It seems today that adolescents aren’t silly enough to believe our government works or that politicians are held accountable or even that what they see on television is reality, but rather that it is all a shifting landscape of available cynical gestures ready for the proverbial YouTube mashup. Authenticity is nearly dead and gone and what remains is mocked openly for it’s naive sensibilities and lack of adherence to the only remaining god, money. It should come as no surprise than, that our most culturally mainstream art form, television has created two powerful dramas that ooze of disdain and contempt for all things moral, righteous or truthful and that deny the concept of authenticity as a strategy, shouting its finality from their bully pulpit.

True Detective and the second season of House of Cards act as agreements in an argument with no contradictions. These dramas about police work in the heart of Louisiana and the machinations of our central government in Washington, DC, accept bleakness as religious doctrine. Both shows a denuded moral landscape so tangible it is like smelling a peach at the apex of its ripeness on a hot summer day. The fine art world, if we can any longer call it that, has remitted a similar ripe oblivion but exhibits it in a way largely inaccessible by the average American, let alone any real admirer of art. Matthew Barney’s latest plethora of shit (literally) filmic opera promises a more esoteric rendering of the aforementioned television dramas. But few will ever see Barney’s high fashion elitist rendition of scatalogical infinity, but many will see House of Cards and True Detective. The new dramas hint back to the fears of the 1970’s (nuclear war, the beginning of the AIDs plague, sexism, and government corruption from the top down) but instead offer a new outpost in post-postmodern explication that insists we should all make peace with the fact that all is lost, rather than remain firmly connected to any remnant of hope. At least, dare I say, there were rafts one could reach out for in the river of shit of the 1970’s. What make these new dramas even harder to digest is the fact that they are so profoundly well acted and written. There is no wink or nod to McLuhan’s Bonanza Land, as in David Milch’s magnificent Deadwood. House of Cards 2 and True Detective forego the Shakespearean rhetoric and ode to westerns in favor a unannounced punch in the nose. Thank you sir, may I have another.

Maybe what bothers me most about all this acceptance of corruption, hate, violence, darkness and sexual malaise is the complacency around it. More than affecting a new kind of awareness, a call to arms that we should all recognize something is terribly amiss about our culture ala Network (1976), we are left alone in the dark to contemplate time being a “flat circle”. True Detective in particular acts as a model for the two extremes that represent themselves in modern America. On the one had we have the greatest increase in religious extremism and fundamentalism in our history, and on the other, the unraveling of time/space with the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I should be celebrating M-theory being used as an expository monologue in American mainstream television, but instead it just makes me sad. To hear Matthew McConaughey recite multiverse theory and superimposition betrays it the wonder it deserves despite his lilting Texas accent. Pizzolatto’s message is clear, we’re all rodents on an endless treadmill doomed to repeat ourselves. Similarly, Francis Underwood, played by the extraordinary Kevin Spacey (who reminds me there is still hope for acting after the death of PSH) has a similar take on time/space, except that his is beholding to only one ideal—power. For the Underwoods as DC power couple, even rape can be turned into a power grab ratings gambit. Even Camille Paglia blushes at Claire Underwoods coldness and calculation.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUfN8wL5zKY&w=560&h=315]I worry that we are less and less impacted, touched, and influenced by art and that it simply serves as yet another device to placate our boredom and hold hands as we walk the flat circle of time. Indeed, Barney’s River of Fundament, loosely based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, is a nod to the perpetual flat circle of time. In some ways the current cultural dynamic is ancient in its parsimonious positioning of romanticism against cold pragmatism, but there is something deeper at play. We are regurgitating centuries of culture on top of itself to the point of blurring any recognition of origin or meaning. We are forcing end game thinking and you can see it in all the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic art being made. This recursiveness will doom us to a self fulfilling prophecy if we can’t see something other, in effect, evolve. Where is the art that will evolve us? Where is the hope?

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

It has been a while since I last posted to this blog, what I have referred to as contemporary art in context. The goal of the blog in the past has been to frame contemporary art, primarily post-WW II work in relation to popular culture, American lifestyle and the reality of our day to day lives. My approach has always been to write in short essay form on a blog. It's an unconventional approach as by nature, blogs have always been intended to be short form, nearly stream of consciousness writings for our so-called busy lives. Therefore, writing short essays on a blog is a contrarian approach in and of itself.

The other evening I was having dinner with a new friend who is a poet and journalist here in Portland. I was commenting about my blog and the curious nature of what I've been attempting to do and she very concisely and unabashedly said that blogging was the wrong place for me to be writing the way I do. This is not the first time I've heard this but for some reason it seemed to resonate this time. Writing by nature is a form of communication and if I was hoping to communicate a particular point of view in a particular form it is important to place that form where it belongs, in her mind in a literary journal or academic journal or even, and I'm not remotely suggesting I write well enough for this, the New Yorker.

After a couple of days of letting this settle in I realized essentially this was the same internal argument I've been having much of my life. It is the central theme to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that life is unresolved because it has only the context of other's experience as a framework. We don't get to live our lives again (unless we're Buddhist) and therefore have no way of understanding life as either heavy or light, important or not. Writing, like other art forms is an attempt to impart a shared knowledge because it is self expression. Through that self expression we hope to find synchronicity with other's experiences through identity. Ultimately we are attracted to works of art because they resonate with something deeply personal in our own existence, even though we had no direct relationship with the artist. The making of art is a bit of a desperate act. A way of sharing something so personal it has to take a metaphorical form, it has to be transformed away from the now. This is why when Komar and Malamud conducted their famous survey of people's favorite paintings and colors, the pastoral savanna landscape was the image that resonated most. It is the collective, connective tissue we all share — our roots in the African plain. Our beginnings as Australopithecus afarensis, our early hominid ancestor. My writings in essay form on this blog in the past have been attempts in my own way to defy the gravity of life.

I awoke this morning realizing that I have been more like Franz and not enough like Tomas. Being is both light and heavy because it is a constant tension between the forces of physics and metaphysics, reality and dreaming, living and being. In the end the great void consumes us all like the black hole at the center of our own galaxy and we become a singularity because we become both everything and nothing. The only meaning we have is the meaning of the now and the wonder of vast number of those segments in time strung together.

For that reason, this blog will behave more like a blog and less like an essay from here on out. Light but dense.

Painting: Rene Margritee, The Son of Man. 1964