Sometimes...

Thank goodness for sea breeze.

A Useful Reminder

A lot of pain is generated when we judge ourselves in accordance with some remote ideal that we think we should follow. This procedure has its uses. Some ideals are worth following. They keep us from getting lost. It might hurt a little bit at the time, but then keep at it and you can get closer and closer. There are no utopias. But there is the good. 

However it is worth remembering that sometimes you simply have to be what you are, goddammit. 

Fragged Love

So different people bond differently with each other. For some the bond is one to one, for others it is more dispersed. Though it seems through repetition a culture begins to carve out a dominant bond-form. Free love, polyamory, open relationships...all these alternatives to dominant culture's monogamous relationship are championed by those seeking to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of ossified cultural institutions.

For some it works. For others not so much. Some types of personalities are just fine hopping from one person to the next, and if the receiving personalities are compatible and enjoy the same activity, well then excellent. Other personalities require more concentrated, lasting bonds.

It is curious how we can take one form of bond out of many and then amplify it by proclaiming its righteousness and multiplying it across the population of a civilization through institution. For as long as the population assents to the ideology attached to a given bond, many different types of people can partake in the institution.

I'm not sure these alternate bonding methods signify any kind of progress; they don't work for everyone. They do seem to be adaptive at a time when there is a great instability that reaches down to the individual level. One can disperse their affections, which can protect against the dissonance generated from the intimacies of unstable individuals.

Stable intimacy in most cases seems to require confidence in one's own character, and confidence in the character of another, and trust in that other's confidence in one's own character. Ingredients like these aren't always all present in a disintegrating society, unfortunate to say, though some people can still do it in any circumstance. And maybe such intimacy can be achieved whether the love is concentrated or widely dispersed. I don't really know. It would depend on the individual experiencing it.    

State of the Bipolar Union

I've spent the evening lying face-down on the bed in a dark room just sort of in general pain about the state of various things, casting occasional ghoulish sideways glances out the window when someone passed by outside. Tinkering a bit on the guitar but the buzz from the pick-ups was getting annoying and I wasn't inspired anyways.

I've finally picked myself up and turned on the light, mainly because some ideas started to form and nag a bit but they've remained disparate and disorganized, so perhaps a little organizing is in order so that I can save myself for another couple of hours (it always helps to work on something worthwhile). I also have some actual paying work to get done having to do with corporate identity and logo design and pardon me, but fuck that right now.

I tried the whole coffee and beer thing again and it worked for a bit, but I have since logged away a mental note somewhere to not try that anymore, as it really doesn't work too well with me. I should get back to abstaining from intoxicants and meditating, but then even then I run into trouble. And I love intoxication, dear me I do. Intoxicants and stimulants seem to me to be these means of "affective compression". One can compress one's pleasure or social grace or calm or speed of thought into a distinct period of time, which necessarily displaces a proportionate amount of compressed displeasure, social discord, disquieted mood or sluggishness of thought to a later period of time, hopefully when one is sleeping or isolated in some way if one times it right. But such manipulations can grow unstable if one sustains them for long enough, naturally.

Meditation on the other hand offers a more evened-out period of serenity,but then one becomes somewhat plant-like. Also perturbations, if intense and sustained enough, can throw one off balance anyways. Also there are always the environmental inputs throwing you back into the bad homeostasis if you aren't careful. Intoxicants and stimulants are more immediate and allow you to strategize and time things, and then meditation and exercise and good nutrition provide a more sustained soundness of mind.

Like with improvised dancing and music, one sometimes loses balance within a given pattern, and to save oneself from falling, one adopts a wholly different pattern that is itself patterned off the note or step or compensatory behavior belted out hastily at that point of crisis. And so survival depends on maintaining a consistent pattern until that pattern itself becomes unstable.

I'm not here to master intoxication, meditation, rational thought, or whatever other medium, but to employ each when each is appropriate in order to master the assembly of ideas in general and the accompanying right-living that goes with right-thought. And the more I learn the more I realize how much learning I have yet to do, and how I'll never really know that much really.

Getting to the point, I've been reading all day about creative bipolarity and its various manifestations in certain famous individuals across time, such as in Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Woolf, Byron, etc. mainly as an attempt to do several things, among them to feel a little less alone, to stop hurting and also to figure out exactly what is wrong and why it is happening.

It seems this tendency is transmitted in part along hereditary lines, travelling in the genes and whatnot. As a child I heard stories about an uncle that sleepwalked off of a cliff, which I thought was very odd, until I found out later that he was actually bipolar and had actually jumped off the cliff in a fit of depression, so maybe that's where it is coming from. It is always important to be aware of the limitations of labels such as these, and it is really hard to tell just what is going on in this universe of ours. Nevertheless always interesting thinking about.

Anyways, the artistic temperament hurts. It really does hurt. It is hard to explain. But then Woolf walked into a lake with stones in her coat, Van Gogh died with a mysterious gunshot wound, Wallace hanged himself, Plath put her head in an oven, Cobain and Hemingway offed themselves with shotguns as far as I know, and then I think Thompson offed himself with a pistol, not long after writing about Hemingway offing himself with the shotgun, and then so on. Then you have who knows how many of the same occurrences with people that we will never know. It seems like a lot of these characters burn bright and then burn out. It gets tiring I guess.

No reason to fixate on the macabre though. With life there's death and such and such and well none of it is a surprise really. But then why, why does this happen? What are these people? These bursts of energy, these nodes at which point there is a tearing away from the conventional cognitive maps and through great pain (and of course great pleasure, that is often forgotten) such minds dip back into the bare realities so to speak to configure new cognitive maps for a new time? It is as if they are points at which the old fabrics tear, then, or to try and conceptualize the strangeness of this universe, they are points at which the wound in the old fabric is so deep, it reaches into another universe altogether, which allows for a traffic between both worlds.

But then I better take a rest for now before this writing gets really bad. I have much more to express but it will have to wait till tomorrow. Feeling a bit blue, with a hurt heart and a hurt stomach and then I'm just kind of tired too.

His Name I Have Trouble Pronouncing

Agh, the man is a virtuoso!

Shapes and Such

And so, the masculine, with its attraction to concavity, brings about a convexity, and the feminine concavity necessarily beckons the convexity in turn.

Maybe it Works

Give each human being chance after chance to deliver what it is that the individual truly wants to deliver, as much as you have endurance for anyways. The closer the person to you the more you have endurance for naturally.

What each person truly wants is to be loved and admired by a community of their peers. This should be enough of a motivating force on the individual level. 

Such a principle could serve as a new socio-economic engine in the next paradigm. It is time to cast away the old notion of profit. 

But beware, such an engine is itself a stabilizing agent, and upon total stabilization of a society, the principle itself may wear out its usefulness, just as the principle of profit, a propulsive agent, wears out its usefulness upon destabilization of a society. 

Time will tell I suppose, as it always does!

A Little Country

It is a curious culture, this country club culture.

Lose yourself in dance, but just as long as you follow these simple, specific sets of rules so that you dance in a perfect line and orient yourself in the same direction as everyone else.

Drink as much as you want. Buy, buy and buy some more. Eat the best cuts of steak.

But these are good country boys and good country girls. They can do whatever they want so long as they do it within the cleanly delineated lines.

Lots of money. Wave after wave of echoes.

Night Stars

You're so far out, but you have further to travel. I don't yet see your light.

There are plenty others that have long since burnt out, though we wouldn't know by the light still reaching us.

Don't worry too much as you spiral further. It will be bright.

About that Fragmentation

Probably the closest you can get to the approximation of whatever evil is. The resistance is encouraging.

The extreme end of an eternal force that must be.

Fa'afafine

Turns out Somoan culture has a third gender called the Fa'afafine, which is basically a biological male that embodies male and female gender traits. These fa'afafine range from very feminine to weakly masculine and can enter sexual relationships with other men or women, depending on preferences. Fa'afafines can take on feminine gender roles and traits and often eschew more masculine traits such as rough competition, and that's totally cool. There's not a real clear defined concept of homosexuality. They just do their thing. Of course you have Christian elements in the population that reject these characters and their behavior (especially when homosexual behaviors are expressed) which is a residual effect of the colonization efforts of New Zealand some time back. Of course. But anyways, the concept of this third gender organically expands an entire culture's notions of gender and sexuality, allowing a greater proportion of the population to be naturally absorbed into the greater community.

That's chill.

Pacifists

Comedians like Bill Hicks and George Carlin have bits where they complain about how the genuinely good pacifist types are always the ones that end up getting assassinated: MLK, Gandhi, Lennon etc. Jokes about why can't this shit happen to the real monsters or the corporate sellouts aside (and granted there are always a plethora of assassination attempts on people like this), this does seem to be somewhat of a disquieting trend.

There is something about being a pacifist that a pacifist probably realizes but doesn't really want to acknowledge. Choosing to stand up to violence and domination as a pacifist is unfortunately an act of declaring war, in this case on war and violence itself. When one defines oneself in opposition to another ideology, it necessary sets one against adherents of that ideology, so that declaring that everyone should get together and love one another becomes a challenge, and eventually an act of violence as perceived by those who identify with a culture of separation, domination and violent force. It is a really fucked up and unfair problem.

What was really interesting to me about the movie "Milk" was the character of the man who assassinated Harvey Milk: Dan White. As Harvey's character became this brighter and brighter star that was afforded  more power and admiration, Dan became darker and more brooding and shamed and powerless. At one breaking point he screamed at Harvey something along the lines of he won't be made a fool of or something like that, I forget exactly what was said. I'm not entirely sure if this exchange really took place but the act seems pretty significant to me. Dan was this conservative figure (who might have been a closeted gay) who was allied with conservative forces and assented to conservative ideologies which happened to be pretty regressive and domineering, whereas Milk was the embodiment of this sort of progressive, loving force. You have this man that is probably very conflicted about who he is, but to abandon who he was would mean to necessarily destroy his self and start over, prostrating himself before the ideology of his rival. No matter how right this choice would be, it seems that it is something few people are capable of.

Almost as if Harvey's fire took all of the oxygen out of the room, the disgraced and deprived Dan had no choice but to commit an act of savagery and destroy him, as there were no logical tools or arguments left to reposition himself and regain what power would afford him his pride; his position had become morally indefensible. Trying to justify the behavior of a murderer is probably not a very desirable or popular endeavor, and that's really not what I'm trying to do here. I just find it interesting that people behave this way.

As it happens, organizations and even empires behave this way as well. It seems that the larger and more powerful something gets, the more necessary it becomes for this thing to identify with a distinct set of ideas, no matter the contradictory nature of its character, and then sharply opposing itself to any ideas that may be different. The same goes for the powerless in relation to power.

So you have the United States going in and picking fights with all these Communist and socialist regimes in places like North Korea, Vietnam and various countries in South America after WWII (and plenty of other places of course - we've had our crusty fingers just about everywhere) and now declaring a literally endless war on pretty much the entire Islamist population; it is our duty as good Christians of course, or good humanists as they spin it today.

The Communist threat was completely overblown, especially by the neoconservatives. So we went out and wasted all this time, effort, energy, and most importantly, lives going out where we didn't belong to put down these regimes that really had nothing to do with us. They were merely political entities that were attempting to position themselves as something apart from global empire, and we didn't like that very much. Many of these regimes ended up becoming state-capitalist endeavours anyway, but because they wished to stand and establish themselves with a different set of ideas at least cosmetically, so as to split nominally from the master empire, so to speak, they had to be destroyed. Then some of these regimes did want to attempt genuinely egalitarian societies. But no, these regimes were pure distilled evil and had to be destroyed. Freedom!

And so now global capitalist empire is all that stands; it spreads to every corner of the globe even as it begins its slow process of decline and disintegration. We see the beginnings of the early indicators of true revolution, when a new ideology coalesces among the powerless, themselves adopting values opposed to the master empire. It will be messy though. We have everything from these secular, humanist, pacifist ideologies struggling to assert themselves, to these regressive fundamentalist Islamist denominations that are really quite indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christian ones ironically enough. These are simply people identifying with a different set of ideas and symbols, if merely to set themselves apart from the master empire and take for themselves a little dignity, even if it means welcoming a hellfire missile.

It is unfortunate to say that still much of the world is ruled by violent, regressive forces. I'd dare say that positioning oneself as a pacifist today is actually a courageous act. For peace to be achieved at this point, it would be necessary for the peaceful themselves to absorb enough of the violent energies of the regressives without reverting to a lower logic of violence and force.

We seem to be attempting to establish this stabilizing executive system which is typified by logic and reason, but to do so requires fitting it atop this old lizard brain, and the mammalian brain too, both these coupled systems that are very much capable of love as well as hate and violence, and so the attempts thus far have resulted in the crumbling of the logical regulative systems and a regression to those elemental forces of violence- the rise of fascism would be the modern age's manifestation of such a tendency.

There is hope too. What is especially interesting about the assassination of a powerful pacifist figure by those forces of violence is the effects that come with the phenomenon of martyrdom. It is almost as if those devoted to the life and ideas of the slain figure double down on their ideas, pulling the fabric together in what amounts to, and yes I guess I'm going to say this, a sort of healing field of love which seeks to pull back together the social organizations that have been torn around the ensuing wound that is left behind from the loss of such a figure. Instead of violent retaliation and the ultimate collapse of pacifism into the violent ideology it is opposed to, we have a scabbing over of the new organism that is attempting to assert itself as something apart from violent empire.

All Things Under the Sun...

Much of what I get off writing about has already been expressed in other times and cultures. I get a good chuckle at the expense of my ego every time I have what I believe to be a major revelation, and then read about this said revelation somewhere in the writings of someone from another time, just articulated in different symbols. 

What does seem to be new today however, is a finer quality of reflexivity. A new layer of understanding of understanding itself seems to be forming, which could have some pacifying effects, seeing as how pretty much all of the mass violence committed in the modern era had to do with fixations on certain ideas, which reflects a pretty poor understanding of understanding. Dogmatists tend to make some very serious theoretical mistakes. 

This buttressing of our metacognitive abilities should have good effects I hope, since we have come to rely so heavily on our intellect for survival. We can think of it as improving the design of our intellectual rudders, say, like adding some moving parts here and there to allow for better navigation. Our higher brain seems to have formed in part to better direct the trajectories of our emotional engines.  

Besides all that, this generation seems to be especially concerned with process. All sorts of ideas have already been thought, and then repeated again and again. But we still haven't quite gotten down the actual process of bringing those ideas into material space. We've ignored what actually happens and then it happens and we are caught with our pants down time and time again. Modern anarchists, for example, are less concerned about their theoretical strength (though they certainly need that eventually as well) and more concerned about how people actually behave and how it is practically possible to implement a society that doesn't require a rigid hierarchy held in place by the threat of violent force to work. Maybe we can learn a thing or two yet. 

Of course students of history will tell you that the more things change the more they stay the same. And you can read any philosopher from the ancients, the medievals, the moderns to the postmoderns and so on and all of them will complain about the tendency towards conventional thought. Every new ideology attracts its lion's share of dogmatists and power climbers. Empires form and great destruction is wrought and then they die, usually kicking and screaming, leading to even more destruction, constitutive ideas be damned.

But it does seem like things do change. Subjectively anyways. But then things become relative on the subjective level too. For the most part, one doesn't have to experience rats clawing into one's stomach (medieval torture), but it still really sucks to get shot, especially in the stomach so they say. One can feel great despair when one's internet connection goes out, maybe a despair that might be qualitatively similar to what an ancient farmer's might have been upon a cycle of unsuccessful harvest. Or not. 

It is hard to say how long we will be around too. A good wallop from a meteor would do the trick, or maybe we just keep flatulating these gases and cook ourselves in good time. All these considerations could be made a moot point, which would make for an absolutely hilarious cosmic joke. I know, I know, morbid thinking and oh, that's just terrible and etc. But I mean, just think about it for a bit and it becomes a little funny. Just picture some Hitlerish figure standing up on top of a tank with his fist in the air, screaming his race or his nation or his god is the chosen one and that with a new industrial mobilization and a new dawn mankind will be redeemed and that if only we can just purge all these lowly races and all these fairies and eggheads then smoosh, he is disintegrated along with everyone else and there is true peace. Not to mention redemption. C'mon. That's kind of funny.  

Mmmhmm

The funny thing about individual egotism is its bi-polar, self-serving nature when actually applied in the real world.

In times of positive expansion, all one can see is one's self. Look how powerful and heroic and awesome one is!

Then when it comes to crisis and diagnosis, well, it is everyone else's fault and the self magically disappears!

Generations

Two riders were out on the bike path on the beach. A man with a head of short gray hair appeared to be the father. He was riding in the forward-moving bike lane, the correct one. The man next to him had short black hair and was wobbling back and forth in the wrong lane. He appeared to be the douchey type, but it would be appropriate to wait and see and avoid hasty judgement.

The son was oblivious of his surroundings. There were riders behind him who couldn't pass, patiently waiting for him to notice or move.

A group of riders came the opposite direction. Amazingly the son didn't move, but then dashed over to the right lane at the right moment, causing the riders in the other direction to veer off to the side, one of the riders almost falling over and crashing.

The father kept glancing over nervously. "Maybe you should get in the right lane son."

"It's fine Dad! This is the new individualism! You can do whatever you want! Who cares about anyone else?!"

Just as the son finished yelling, his wobbling trajectory drifted increasingly to the far end of the wrong side of the bike path, where he came up against a cluster of people coming the opposite direction. He lost his balance and crashed down into a nearby bed of grass.

Abstract and/or Practical Advice

Strike while it's hot!

Fear of Madness

It seems to me that part of the danger of going mad lies in no longer being able to communicate to others the nature of one's existence as a suffering being.

One becomes an island where the language ceases to circulate. Where the light of exchanged traffic dies. One becomes tormented by the presence of one's own unreceived thoughts.

It is curious that many of our most essential struggles take place on this language platform that is not directly responsible for subsistence. Though this could be a mistake. It could be that our nature as complex social animals is essential to our survival.

This would make our language centers essential organs. As the heart pumps through blood, so our brains pump through this information that flows through and connects and sustains us.

Honest Music

It seems like in a lot of cases, when we talk about truth and honesty, especially when it comes to artistic expression, we are talking about the nature of those primordial, subterranean emotional movements that take place in the older regions of our brains.

Making honest music then has to do with channeling what those landscapes have to tell us. This is by no means an easy task: we often talk about the sweetness of passionate expression while ignoring the great horrors that have to be reckoned with in the process of reaching such expression.

It is far easier to traverse such dreadful landscapes - or attempt to erase their existence altogether - by encircling them with reassuring symbolic narratives that attempt to make sense of this strange universe of ours, preferrably symbolic narratives that have already been created by some poor sucker doing the heavy lifting of building a fresh narrative atop his or her own experiences of those elemental emotional realities. That way one doesn't have to face bare reality head-on.

I would venture the argument that recorded music is a sort of symbol.Thus we have countless artists constructing their work in accordance with some celebrated coherent musical system. The accumulation of such activity produces genre. So let's say I worship a certain metal, or punk, or folk artist in particular and wish to recreate that feeling and that aesthetic wholesale in my own work. If you examine the lives of these pioneering artists, you usually find that they are tortured characters who probably had to come to terms with their own nature lest they be destroyed, and ended up doing that by expressing that nature honestly with the birth of a new musical idea. That leaves a musical artifact that can be conveniently plucked up by others, which can then reproduce many of the emotions and contemplation that gave birth to the original work. Those who borrow these ideas then don't have to touch those creative fires that gave birth to the ideas in the first place.

Don't get me wrong: lots of excellent music can be construed as echoes of an old idea. And who wants to subject his or herself to that all-consuming fire if it is unnecessary to live a good life?

But then there's a slight problem. With every repeated borrowing of that old idea, the idea itself undergoes a sort of decay in material space. We get waves of good echoes until the echoes weaken to a point of us experiencing them as "contrivances" and "lies", possibly because each of these echoes percolates into finer and finer subcultures, and so a once universal language becomes fragmented and communication dies. And so a new idea has to be generated, most likely at the point at which feeling alone and being under the impression that one is living a lie is more painful than thrusting oneself back into the emotional inferno in search of that salvation which is the experience of unity or absolute good, or what we sometimes call "truth".

Making honest music means always fighting demons. Being in doubt, being afraid, hesitant, unsure, desperate, alone and more...all of these emotions accompany the experience of leaving the comfort of our shared symbolic reality and trudging into the unknown. One can channel one's heroes: past musical greats that have gone through the same process and brought back musical expression in its various forms, musical expression that reflects the greater truths of a given epoch, but in the end one is alone to express one's own subjectivity in one's own time.

Honest music isn't necessarily good music. One sometimes has an overpowering fear that the noise pouring fourth from one's fingers and instrument is just a manifestation of madness...a sonic manifestation of the fact that one has become lost and has succumbed to one's demons. Always a possibility, and a danger. And so maybe one's honest music is madness. Another possibility to consider however is finding truth and being able to share that truth with others, and so the honest music becomes good music. It makes the risk worthwhile. Hell, some even like to listen to the sounds of madness, and call it good and valuable. I sometimes have a taste for such things. To each his own as the tired saying goes.

To drive all of this rambling home, let's take an example from another discipline. Ernest Hemmingway has two related quotes concerning these matters when it comes to writing:

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” 

This first quote seems reassuring. Truth! That's easy. But when it comes to articulating the truth, and in the social sphere no less, it becomes apparent that it is not so easy. And we come to realize the truth of the second related quote:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” 

I could go on and on with examples spanning cultures and disciplines. Perhaps I could produce one thousand examples. Yes there is even a theory that systematically takes note of just this sort of phenomena. Joseph Campbell calls it a "monomyth". As it happens, it is something that happens.

Keeping Things in Perspective

The way things have been going the past 30 years, and even well before that, there's been lots of condemnation of the Western tendency towards materialism and reductionism.

Now sure these tendencies are problematic at their extreme end. However the separation of particulars into discreet units of analysis for eventual material manipulation can be quite useful. Western technologies and medicine have done plenty of good.

Each of our bodies is indeed an engine for experiencing a sustained period of consciousness, and they should be understood.

We all come from the same place, and everything really is one, but then life itself is experienced out of difference. The only way to the consciousness we are familiar with is by being instantiated as a living, finite, decaying universe within a universe: a living body. The quickest way to absolute unity is through death after all.

Many followers of the great religions make the mistake of rejecting the material world in favor of some postulated metaphysics of a spiritual world. Such a tendency is understandable, given the origins of this type of ideology, which is usually birthed at a time when a material society is at the height of corruption and the values become inverted.

However this thinking carries with it its own set of problems. It leads to an ossified ideology whose pendulum has swung in the other direction, leading to rigid modes of thought in which the spiritual realm is accorded special privilege, where institutions form around interpreting this world, and then power forms around what is claimed to be the correct interpretation. Then the pendulum is set to be swung in the direction of materialism once again and so on.

The wiser Buddhists seem to be aware of this, as well as several other spiritual philosophies across cultures. Such philosophies usually identify a world of spirit and a world of man, a world of unity and a world of particulars, and carry special prescriptions for moving through both.

We do have to move through both worlds. It is the nature of our reality. This lesson should be well-remembered at a time when it is all too easy to become disgusted with materialist values at the sight of such widespread corruption.

Yes, everything has to come back together eventually. But everything exists as difference. The trick is achieving harmony with difference.

Further Thoughts On Fragmentation

Man, a cereal like Reese's Bites is poison! I had a bowl of it the other morning; it was a cereal I enjoyed in my childhood. Then I was sick and literally crazy most of the day.

To think, we shovel this stuff into kid's mouths and boot em off to school by the millions. Then diagnose them the next minute with ADHD and pump them full of Ritalin. We are absolutely nutzo.

But that's what any advanced form of life does to try to control its environment I guess. We just push it as far as we can possibly take it and lose balance. We take things out of the context in which they grow in order to repurpose it for some other task, oftentimes to correct some form of imbalance.

For example, maybe we get sick, possibly from some sort of chemical in the environment, or depressed from...well working some stupid meaningless job or other, and to correct this imbalance we take some drug to sort of, you know, redirect our biochemical systems. This drug was in turn created out of compounds found in nature, which are recombined in various chemical processes by equipment that is also created out of various compounds and minerals, inside laboratories that are built out of compounds, minerals and other materials also found in nature. And then these processes themselves rely pretty heavily on oil extraction.

So in that way a lot of our energy, transportation, food production, and I guess basically almost everything else relies heavily on the extraction of oil and its refinement into various substances. We use oil to fertilize our plants because a lot of the soil sucks because of the way we conduct agriculture, and we use oil for a lot of our energy needs, and we use oil to transport a lot of things, and etc.

If each of these processes works well and is repeated, we come to rely on the processes to keep things moving. It takes the repeated production of agents that are created out of repurposed natural compounds to continue to make the process work.

So you have a dual conflict starting to form here. As things grow more complex, it takes more energy and information to keep everything going as a whole, and the more interdependent everything becomes on a lot of processes that really don't take care of themselves, processes that need increasingly complex inputs that require energy and really don't continue on if you don't tend to them. On top of that, if you are mining out these raw resources on a large enough scale where the earth can't replenish them, you're going to run out.

Life systems are pretty flexible. They can take pretty substantial changes and then either revert back to their original states or continue on if the new state is sustainable. But the scale we are doing things, and the clusterfucked fragmentation we've gotten our living systems into...well.

All this is actually really really fascinating. It is too bad it is all happening under the feet of billions of people.

I mean, it would be nice if we as an organism formed leaner, more flexible organizational systems that were always changing with changing conditions. But we seemed to have developed this damning tendency to grow very large and complex...and attempt to freeze things as they are, the surrounding conditions be damned, until it all breaks down at once. Hopefully we can reverse this tendency before a mass extinction event.

There are those of us that are always thinking about the past, the present and the future, always wondering what is next, what lessons should be learned, etc. But then there is a greater proportion of us that follows the same conventional, authoritarian frameworks, stuck orbiting the same circuits, receiving pleasure after pleasure that was received in the same way by the generation before. I think of that rat in the cage that just keeps pressing the button  that activates the electrode in its pleasure center. Just pressing the button, pressing the button, pressing the button.

Makes me think of Townes Van Zandt's lament:

Being born is going blind 
And buying down a thousand times 
To echoes strung 
On pure temptation 

All the while with the entire apparatus that powers the conventional pleasure machine hollowing out the earth below, until one experiences a Wile E Coyote moment where one realizes the floor is no longer there.

There is a way out of course. It just takes a lot of thinking and the will to change.

What does this have to do with Reese's Bites? Everything I suppose.

And Inward

Ideas and expressions flow outward from what something is, sure.

What something is, however, is owed in part to the ideas and expressions that flow in, that make an impression.

And the environment itself that serves as cradle for what is takes its form partially from its inhabitants, which are always acting on it in accordance with certain ideas and expressions received prior.

Yes, this world of ours is quite complex.

Beachside Zen With Some Inner Working Gears

It was a warm day out in Long Beach with a pleasant finish. The evening was clear and the late sun looked good on the sand and the water. Many people were out walking with their mothers including me, which was appropriate enough considering it was Mothers Day. We walked down to the beach to go stand in the water, as the late afternoon sun had been pretty hot.

The water felt good. The city looked beautiful with the blazing orange sun dropping behind it, silhouetting the high rises. Families were still out playing in the water and lying about on the sand.

The water itself was magnificent. And I'm just talking about the crashing waves that were right in front of us. The waves would crash rhythmically, producing swirling patterns of bubbles that flowed in atop the rippling surface, chaotic bubble clusters that were birthed with the crashing water. Beneath the surface of the crashing waves, the disturbed sand beneath erupted into clouds that came in with the tide and then were sucked back out within seconds. As the water fell back, the eroding sand slid down the shore in shimmering arrow-like patterns. An entire universe ebbing and flowing at our feet. Gorgeous.

There were great truths expressed in those waves that I could only think about intuitively. One can think about the scientific principles behind the crashing waves and the eroding sand but what does it all really mean at its core? Its curious to think about how compartmentalized our modern knowledge systems are. Spiritual masters reside in their spheres, philosophers in theirs, scientists in theirs, all talking of the same things with completely different sets of languages and concepts. Though there is always traffic between the spheres. Those avenues need to be broadened. More communication.

Of course, such philosophical issues and practical questions have been explored by plenty of thinkers for a long time. Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" explores just these sorts of issues (I haven't read it yet myself, just read about it). His metaphysics of Quality seeks to account for Western rationalism's great weakness: a relentless and blind reductionism that only contributes to further and further physical and intellectual divisions, by combining with it lessons derived from Eastern philosophy's tendency to emphasize one-ness and whole-ness and the associated Zen mindset that goes with that. F. S. C. Northrop has pursued similar lines. It is interesting that the greater mass of Western thought emphasizes reduction and division while the greater mass of Eastern thought emphasizes the interconnected nature of reality and oneness. Though of course those respective bodies of thought are by no means distinct entities: they've influenced each other and trafficked in each others' ideas for centuries.

It is a shame none of us as cultures have learned from the accumulated knowledge (well at least the dominant, mainstream cultures). We end up with these varying forms of hierarchies of domination in which rationalism is compartmentalized and instrumentalized, thus rendered politically harmless, and spiritualism either becomes absorbed into the economic/state apparatus (as we see with the sick spectacle of the Christian Imperialism of the US) or compartmentalized itself and eventually ossified into its own hierarchical institutions embedded into greater society, where it also becomes politically harmless. How to overcome this state of affairs? More in a bit.

On the walk back, some wonderful graffiti. I've been coming across a lot of really good graffiti lately that is less a territorial marking and more a meaningful plea of some type:

Good signs. Less tribalism. More general human concern. The really curious thing about this particular scrawling is that slavery is misspelled as "slalerery" which is then crossed out. A mistake? Possibly. If so the author accidentally gave us a pleasant gift. But I doubt it was a mistake. Slavery is wildly misspelled. Everyone knows "slavery". And "emancipate" is probably tougher to spell anyways. Perhaps this message is trying to say something about illiteracy? Our schools are doing an increasingly poor job at educating children in even the basics, especially poor schools populated by minorities, which itself can be traced back to funding and institutional racism, on top of the fact that our entire public sector, including our schools, is being economically eviscerated to account for war spending, lesser land taxes and capital taxes which mainly affect the rich, corporate subsidies, bank usury, and whatever oligarchic rot you can think of. 

Illiteracy is incredibly intellectually crippling too. Illiteracy is widely ridiculed in an advanced society and so if you are trying to say something but can't properly do so, chances are you won't be taken seriously, which itself contributes to serious psychological complexes and problems with self-confidence. Such a state necessarily constitutes mental slavery, in many different ways. It is a great injustice. 

But lets dig in to the core meaning of the message itself, word-play and hidden messages aside. This particular message is reminiscent of Bob Marley's plea to "emancipate yourselves from mental slavery" in his Redemption Song, a plea that seems to have come from Marcus Garvey: "We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind ..."

What does it mean to emancipate yourself from mental slavery? It is quite an analogy. Where is the master? Where is the slave? Garvey mentions that one can be the slave of another that uses his mind, but there is always more to it than that. I didn't read Garvey's work but I imagine he understood this too. 

One carries a master in one's own mind, namely the values of dominant culture, which is in turn enforced by probably what we crudely call the super ego. Emancipation takes much effort, care and time. Perhaps it is a process that never ends. 

Such an endeavor requires a post of its own. 

Outwards

Ideas and expression flow forth out of what something is.

I wish to make music that reflects a cosmic ideology. Music that always changes, that bubbles out of the chaotic depths and hardens around an intelligible theme upon repetition of pleasurable elements, that then collapses back into the ether comfortable with the birth and death of its own distinct life. Also that each of the actors expressing this are equal in their power relations and are free to express themselves within the group, adding to the overall mass of artistic output.

Can produced like this, as far as I know. Curious that they saw themselves as an anarchist collective. C.communism, a.anarchism, n. nihilism. Curious elements indeed.

All this stands in contrast to the dominant mode of music-making in the West: the careful construction of repeated elements in which certain artists within the group rise as the dominant artistic members that influence the artistic direction and a hierarchy forms around the construction of crystalline musical works. Such a phenomenon produces great music, but its no longer what I'm interested in personally, though elements of this can always figure in. The actual practice is never as pure as the ideology of course.

I can gaze back and rationalize all this out of my preferences and relate it back to the philosophy I work on. But really it all stems from intuitive tendencies that I otherwise can't dispense of. It is how I make music. It is what moves me. Everything else bores me or angers me, which I really don't have that much control over.

We experience ourselves choosing a philosophy. But we also simply move forward as part of a greater indifferent force.

The Burden of Being Human

It was good to be out alone at 1 o clock in the morning. I had to take a whiz, so I scrambled my way down a crumbly path on the bluff, took my boots off, felt the sand in my toes, and urinated in the ocean.

It was good to hear the water lap at the shore, and to watch the myriad orange lights shimmer on the silvery surface of the quivering water.

It was good to walk along the shore out in the dark unseen.

It was good to run out in the quiet street, ignoring traffic lights.

Back to being an animal for a brief moment. Sometimes it is a relief.

Hodgepodge

I laid in bed trying to sleep off the Mexican food and tequila in my belly. The sun came through the blinds and the ocean breeze came in through the open window, and the palm trees outside rustled in the wind and everything was alright.

 All the dogs wanted in so I let them up on the bed. I had to manage each of them carefully. The smaller one's ego rages and she gets very angry when the rest get up on the bed, so I had to hold on to her while the poor bastards climbed their way up. The cat wanted to look out the window so I threw a blanket on top of the amp and she got up and gazed out. All these animals finding themselves stuck in a single house together, learning to co-exist given the circumstances. I fell asleep. 

Later I thought of a beautiful girl that rode by on a beach cruiser, smiling behind blue plastic shades. A gush of warmth following. 

I thought of totems and astrological signs and old religions and timeless archetypes and the converging narratives of those ancient disparate knowledge systems across centuries. There's a wealth of ancient knowledge that modern rationalism tends to discard, but there's much in there that can be mined out; it can be quite useful. Each culture has something to say. It has to be decrypted and integrated. 

Sometimes the old Western methodology of having a few drinks, feeling sorry for oneself, scrambling one's brains up for a bit, and then letting vague revelations settle over to be meditated on later after an afternoon nap can be quite useful, especially in the face of an existential bottleneck. Then at other times those Eastern methodologies are the antidote to Western madness. We are creatures exposed to numerous knowledge systems crashing together in information space. We have to make do with whatever we find useful. 

Went on a bike ride to burn off the alcohol. Keep moving, moving, moving to the drum beat. Passed a stop sign with a stenciled "US" underneath. Made me think of a stop sign in Berkeley that had "Driving" painted underneath. Both messages are pretty moving, though STOP US seems to me a pretty profound statement in many ways, whether the defacer (or facer) intended it or not. 

Scrounchins

My cat's name is "Scrounch". The name is derived from a sound she made as a young 'un. The name has since mutated into all sorts of silly variations.

Sometimes when I reach out to scratch her and show her affection, she wraps her claws around my arm and scratches and bites the shit out of me. It hurts and I have no idea why she does it. But I still love her. She's a cat and she does what she does. Who am I to say otherwise?

That's love.

Dammit!

In all my excitement, I overshot my actual 500th post, which I was looking forward to announce. So two posts ago was my actual 500th post. Cheers.

Cheers to Consolidation

One thing to keep in mind is that bigness is a problem in itself. Beware of bigness. During the period of the Gilded Age, just before the Great Depression, there was a great consolidation of corporate entities and there existed some of the largest monopolies the American people had seen yet. This phenomenon also correlated with record levels of inequality, which in turn correlated with social instability, corruption and rampant financial speculation. There is something about these voracious economic entities: the larger they get, the more they contribute to stagnation and declining levels of profit, which in turn leads to those at the top taking more for themselves to compensate, which in turn necessarily squeezes those at the bottom. Those at the very bottom become ever-more emaciated and everyone involved lies and cheats in order to keep the entire sordid affair going as long as possible. And then, well, it reaches a hypercritical point when expansion is no longer possible (even as a fiction), then blows up and people go crazy and go to war.

It as if we find ourselves playing a game of Monopoly again and again, with a small proportion of the population (very small) winning basically everything and walking away while all the losers fight amongst themselves for whatever scraps are left.

I can't claim to understand the subtleties of these historical movements. It takes a lifetime of study to truly understand. And then some. But there are general patterns that arise and hints that glint here and there that provide enough for a lead or two.

As it happens, what prompted all this was a cute little Dairy Queen commercial. A soothing voice cheerily informed us that Orange Julius smoothies are available at your nearest Dairy Queen location. Which is really nice. But then Orange Julius was bought by DQ in 1987, so my guess is they are scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit, which is OK. We all have to scrape the barrel here and there.

So then, wow, Dairy Queen owns Orange Julius. Who owns Dairy Queen? As it turns out, Berkshire Hathaway owns Dairy Queen. Berkshire Hathaway is pretty big. What else do they own? GEICO, BNSF Railway, Lubrizol which is a chemical company, Fruit of the Loom, Helzberg Diamonds, and NetJetz which is a private jet company, appropriately enough. Berkshire also owns half of Heinz, an "undisclosed" amount of Mars, and significant minority holdings in American Express, Wells Fargo, Coca Cola and IBM. And these are all very, very, very large companies themselves.

Why are all these brands presented to us as separate, isolated choices? They're all these tiny hydra heads that appear to us friendly and sunny, all leading back to a large extractive entity that will never be satisfied with what it has. I suppose on some level the controllers sense that revealing to people that they really don't have that many choices might make them a little nervous.

It would be nice if our media systems, which are supposed to supply us good information, could inform us of this state of affairs. Upon studying history, perhaps we could learn a lesson or two and apply it to the present; you know, to keep perpetuating our species. But then consider our current state of media with this helpful infographic.

Even creepier, that's happening to our food supply too.

So where is the FCC? The FDA? Where is anti-trust and consumer protection? Even these scary infographics are leaving out even more: the government itself is included in part of this economic consolidation. Consider all of the lobbyists running around waving around cash, or at least favors and appeals that can be considered equivalent to cash.  Legalized bribery. Or consider all of these suits moving in and out of large corporations and going into political office, or those going out of political office and into large corporations in reward for their service. Regulations tend to get gutted as the entities that are under regulation become more powerful than the enforcers. Their tendrils reach into the State, colonizing it and rendering it under control.

The point of all this isn't to point out some grand malevolent conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. But all of these developments are guided with a common logic: the logic of capital accumulation and maximization of profit. Such primary principles order all subsequent activity. None of these top controlling executives care about micromanaging people's lives. They only care about becoming more powerful and rich, which in turn determines the manifestation of economic hierarchy and the behavior of all economic entities controlled by them, which in turn control lower micro-entities that will behave in concert. We are talking about a natural process that occurs along varying intervals that differ only in magnitude.

One begins to smell gas and one becomes a little nervous about the open flame flickering in the next room because one knows what happens when gas and flame mix. We also know enough about how unregulated capital behaves and the consequences that that behavior has for the global population. This will not end well.

No matter how cheerily and happily Dairy Queen tells you that you can get Orange Julius smoothies in their store.

This is no reason to despair however. Always darkest before dawn and all that. Lots of good work to do. Lots to learn. Lots to experience.

Whoops

The interesting thing about political propaganda is the increasingly intense cascade of problems it causes over the subsequent generations after its inception.

What I mean by this is that when someone lies for political gain, or even better a group of interests advances a campaign of sustained lies with think tanks, foundations, lobbyists, media propaganda and what have you, you end up left with two parties: the benefiting party that is doing the lying for self-gain, and the receiving party that is being lied to so that the benefiting party can keep doing what it is doing. Typically a lie is fashioned for short term purposes: one can afford to detach a narrative from reality if one doesn't expect to deal with the problems that will eventually arise with that act.

Salient lies continue to circulate well after the lying party has departed with its benefits. You have generations of people growing up living by these lies, because many people just do what they are told; it is a comfortable ride living your life in social conventions, so long as they are stable and get you what you need. You do what you are told and you receive the related gifts.

But then there is a problem: you have a generation of people living on and acting on what they believe to be truths that are misaligned with the underlying reality. And then if these people form a political interest group that is put into the position of lying to their constituents for personal gain, they have no choice but to fashion lies in relation to a worldview that is itself a system of coherent lies. You are seeing distortions put on top of distortions. So you are slicing off pieces of reality with each generation of propaganda, and in subsequent generations you are slicing off of pieces that have themselves been sliced off, and so you drift further and further from reality, and become unable to solve even simple problems having to do with reality as a result.

In the end, you are left with a generation that produces problem-solving organizations such as the extreme section of the Republican Party. Sucks!

New Names for Old Things

We're made to think that communism is some anomaly dreamed up by the Devil Man Marx but it is really quite old. The relationship between a mother and her child is communist. When the baby cries and it needs to be fed, she doesn't ask what the baby will do for her in return.

Capitalist relations seem to form when there's a breakdown in trust, and people don't want to deal with each other. Perhaps after the old collective dies.

There's nothing wrong with capitalism in a hostile environment in which you don't trust people.You simply make the exchange and move on.

But if you want to be able to love and trust people, you'll want to go communist.

Take that classic motif that is repeated in drama and comedy: the couple or two friends develop a schism and section off the room, declaring each his or her own private area.Then it arises that there are things across each line that the other needs, and the two traffic back and forth until the tension is dissipated and they dispose of the line and come back together.There is a moral there: yes individuation can develop in times of distrust, but the division creates tensions that are unsustainable. We are too closely connected to each other and the earth to be able to divide ourselves from anything and distinguish ourselves as separate, for a protracted amount of time anyways, geological or not. Eventually it all must come back together.

But then labels themselves...communism, capitalism, they're only really good for analysis and thinking about certain natural phenomena. The labels themselves are acts of separation that necessarily exclude information. Someone may identify with one of the other term emotionally because they have a stronger tendency towards either idea. But really each of us has a mixture of both tendencies within. It is up to us which tendency is strengthened and which is suppressed at a given time.

The other danger is that if one chooses a given label like one chooses a team, which of course I'm guilty of, one risks creating a dichotomy and the resulting "us and them" division. It seems to happen of its own accord in practice. Sometimes it can't be resisted and sometimes it can. It is good to be conscious of at least.

Without a Home

I guess there have been several occurrences in the area recently in which people have been spotted sleeping in their cars. In some places this is a regular occurrence, though it is surprising to see this in a wealthier neighborhood. It might be the broader streets and deeper shadows, who knows.

There were two people this morning laid back in their seats in a white sedan, bundled up in blankets. There was a dog thrashing about on top of the poor people, barking at passerby.

The risk of sleeping like that in a neighborhood like this has to do with the disposition of many of the wealthy. They like their streets looking clear and clean and nice, without troubling reminders of the state of the economy and the fate of the less fortunate. Perhaps this is a neighborhood of sympathetic citizens, but who knows how long this will last. It only takes one person to call, someone who is perhaps a little more particular about how their street looks.

Sleeping in one's car is illegal in many cities, as well as other forms of public sleeping, loitering, and general vagrancy. Homelessness has gradually and systematically become a form of crime in this country. They are passed along from city to city. This refusal to accommodate introduces a consistent logic that becomes increasingly difficult to resist as the flow of homeless increases: less cities accept their homeless so that the homeless traffic itself becomes an increasing burden on wherever it happens to end up, so that all cities must close their doors lest they are left with an environmental disaster.

The homeless are passed along until they are gathered in some shanty town like refuse. Or of course they are arrested and absorbed back into the system via incarceration, though our prisons are desperately overcrowded, just like our homeless shelters. The homeless population increases. So does the prison population. An increasingly expensive and energy-intensive mass of dead weight...not good. And do we need to mention the inhumanity?  

Tight Rope Music

One feels all sorts of different things when making music. Calm, love, anger, sorrow, solidarity with one's fellow peers, and etc.

One of the more salient experiences for me is this musical play that can be seen as a dance with death, so to speak. One dances along a point of high tension, like dancing along a tight-rope, attempting greater and greater feats in defiance of gravity and physical and psychological limitations.

One of the truly great forms of soloing takes on this form. You get this rapid fire of ferocious notes that all dance along the beats of the drum, the entire line pulled tight with the anticipation that failure such as a skipped note disrupts the mood enough to figure as catastrophe.

It all comes at the risk of social death in this case. One makes a mistake at such a heightened moment and one falls to destruction in the eyes of one's peers.

These death games show up in many expressive forms throughout many cultures. Part of sublime experience consists of being on the verge of death - or at least simulating it - staring it in the face while demonstrating the maximum level of control of one's own expression, pushing equilibrium to the tipping point by performing increasingly ornate and skillful feats, thereby increasing the levels of concentration needed to maintain control.  The concept of flow comes to mind here too: one is master over sights, sounds, touch, etc. in the face of death. All this is better when the music is loud and hot.

We like to get our little hearts beating. That's for sure.

One can take the implied cruelty out of this activity with the understanding that there are those around us - our bandmates, friends, communities, whatever - that can catch us if we do happen to fall.

Don't Despair

Cruelty comes out of inflammation. It is conditional. One is not absolutely cruel.

Power: What?

So what then is power?

It is usually defined as the ability to do or act. I think that is pretty good. Further, it seems to be an ability to act in and alter the world in accordance with one's own person, idea or tribal identity. The notion of power requires location. It requires a distinct entity to exercise it.

One can exercise power with the manipulation of tools and other inanimate objects, or through the body power of other individuals via persuasion, or in less honorable conditions, via manipulation or force.

The Goddess H: Developing the Image

My good friend John was kind enough to allow me to post his essay on the development of his work, The Goddess H. The following is the essay complete with the respective images, which is necessary to the overall experience of the narrative. I'll let the work speak for itself. Enjoy!

Development of The Image: 

SHE comes 4^th

    Thirty-four years ago an ecstatic event illuminated my mind and altered my approach to making art. Shortly after that my mind flashed with an “electrifying” profundity as I stumbled through the decoding of Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic “Large Glass.” It was then at the age of thirty-one after this awakening that I finally stopped looking to art for support. My singular focus since the age of three has been making art. Realizing that if I was creatively gifted, that by receiving those abilities I owed everything and nothing was owed to me. I began to understand that the reason for being given a gift is because in return the world needs you to give it back.  At that moment I stepped on a creative path asking the universe to make me of loving service with its gift; and so it has without fail for the past three decades.

     At the home of friends on the winter solstice, December 22, 2011, I showed a body of work to the public for the first time in 33 years. I was celebrating my 65^th birthday with the unveiling a new art piece. It also marked the mid-point of my thirty-third year journeying into regions opened by Marcel Duchamp. The new work I showed was based on Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack,” which he purchased in Paris in 1914. This common drying rack was both the precursor and prototype to Duchamp’s famous Ready-mades. Infamous among them was the urinal signed, “R. Mutt.” In 1917, incongruously displayed on its back and titled “Fountain,” this commercial plumbing fixture was surreptitiously entered for an exhibition by Duchamp. After all, it was he who quipped:  “America has given the world her plumbing and her bridges.”

     In the 1960s, toward the end of his life, Duchamp was asked about his enigmatic “Bottle Rack.” In his usual tongue-in-cheek manner, he lamented with a subtle admonishment: “Ah! My poor old Bottle Rack and still no bottles!” So, like a dog on a bone, I decided after 33 years to answer Marcel with my own tongue-in-cheek condolence.  On black velvet I boldly spelled out in four-inch brass letters… “THERE THERE MARCEL THEIR THERE.” Above this Gertrude Stein-like statement was a trompe l’oeil construction made in three flat-stacked layers of 1/16^th inch balsa wood that recreated Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack.” It had been coated in white gesso and then illustrated in silver point. To heighten the deception I replaced the central illusionistic prong with a real metal one and hung a champagne bottle. On its field of black velvet the “Bottle Rack” appeared in the round floating in deepest space, finally carrying its long sought empty wine bottle.

    I unveiled this work accompanied by twenty-one other pieces, ten of which contained elements I had gathered over the years. These were completed during the six months it took to create the main piece. In the manner of a reverse potlatch the other 11 artworks, gifts I had made for family and friends, were returned for this occasion. Borrowing from Duchamp, I said the accompanying works were “brothers and sisters” reuniting to welcome their new “big brother.” It was only after the unveiling that I realized in placing the freshly washed bottle on its rack I had actually marked the END of my journey! For better or worse after 33 years I had arrived on some other creative shore. I hoped to establish a sure footing and I knew the adjustment of my sea legs could take a while.

   Before me lay only one loose thread. Twelve days prior to my show Tony, the youngest brother of my dear friend Penny, unexpectedly passed away. It was time to be of loving service to her during the mourning period.  As usual the creative process proved to be prescient. In late November I had invited Penny for a sneak preview of the Bottle Rack illusion. On the wall of my workspace was an earlier version. It was my third attempt to master the illusion, but its scale proved to be off by an inch in all directions. I referred to it as the “little brother” in relation to the larger version I was in the process of silver pointing.  When she admired it I offered it to her as a souvenir of the creative process, and because it was naked in its gesso state I titled it “Just the Bones.”

   In early January I accompanied her to the garage that held the odds and ends of her late brother’s life. On a worktable was a scattering of his glass experiments including several spiraling spires, each approximately five inches long and curved. As usual Tony’s handling of the glass medium was attenuated to a point of breathlessness. He took what was by nature already fragile and drew it almost to the breaking point.  I took these delicate spires back to my workroom. Mounting “Just the Bones” on a piece of plywood covered in a matte black jersey, I then inserted a fragile spear of glass in place of the metal rod. It looked like the final exhale of a soul as it leaves the body; the upward thinning spiral of glass echoed the poet Yeats as a soul ”pernes in a gyre.”  I drove the completed piece back to Penny’s home and we installed it in a large niche to the left of her fireplace flanked by two of Tony’s experimental glass constructions as sentinels. Quietly it sat at rest overlooking the first year she spent without him.

   The following October, Penny sent an E-mail to the immediate family asking them to reserve time on December 10^th to observe a yahrzeit marking the first anniversary of their brother’s passing.  In Judaism, the first yahrzeit traditionally delineates the yearlong formal mourning period with an unveiling of a memorial stone. This moment essentially says…”Enough” and the family can return to its normal flow of life. As Tony was untraditionally cremated, she had asked me to help create an alternative to the traditional stone marker. By mid November I decided to use “Just the Bones” as the memorial. I brought it back to my workroom.  At first I thought I’d formalize the work, replace the jersey with black velvet and create an appropriate frame. The more I looked at it, after comprehending the tradition of yahrzeit, I saw that a marker delineating time would need a different approach.

   Duchamp had taught me a lot, including the fact that black is not the color of death. Black is associated with the living, who are in mourning. The dead are like bones bleached white; moreover the white symbolizes transparency.  Instinctively I knew that a glass case was perfect for Tony’s memorial.  My design required sandwiching  “Just the Bones” between a back sheet of tempered glass and an annealed interior glass panel that could be drilled allowing the fragile spire to pierce that sheet as it entered the construction, pressed between these panels. Like smoke raising I lightly sandblasted on the front panel the title as a long stack of words:

“ Just the Bones Little Brother Just the Bones.” The final result would be an illusion of “bones” floating in air. In bonding together all seven pieces of glass forming the case I knew a set of registry marks would be needed for precise alignment. I placed a large sheet of graph paper on my worktable and laid the balsa construction on the grid. Taking a pencil I quickly traced the interior voids and marked the extreme points in the upper half. This drawing would go under the glass as the box was being assembled, keeping all the elements in position.

     After lifting the balsa piece off the graph, I turned to hang it on the wall. I happened to glance over my shoulder. There on the worktable was the unexpected! In place of a simple registration was, without a doubt, the archetypal image of the ancient Goddess, herself.  My mind spun. While working on a death piece, in being of loving service to my dear friend, a true gift had appeared: SHE, the great manufacturer of life, the parthenogenetic force, the ELOHIM! had entered my workroom.

Origin of the Image: SHE comes 4^th

   After the memorial in December I had time to contemplate the image. Firstly, I had already realized that an unseen Elohim-like understructure supported all of Duchamp’s work. Now,  SHE, a by-product of the creative process, was in the process becoming an intentional portrait. Moreover, the image was inherently true in several important aspects. To begin with SHE was essentially not there, because I had traced the voids not the “Bottle Rack.” SHE was a composite of the invisible. Because of the original intent, which was to carry a wine bottle, the illusionary prong that would have inhabited the upper rectangle had been removed, relieving that area of its features. Classically the face of the Goddess was not to be witnessed. Indeed the rectangle serving as her head is blank. Her welcoming stance, arms upraised and opened, is found throughout antiquity. Her hands curve slightly inward and resemble the double serpents that served her.  The present day

caduceus, symbol of physicians, is a remnant of that ancient world. Also her beehive shaped skirt is in perfect alliance with the Goddess. The beehive, with its single queen and her drones, has always been among her symbols. It was that metaphor wherein the singular feminine is served by a group of men that I recognized her true identity as the ELOHIM.

  This term is used throughout the old testament as a name or aspect of YHWH.  EL is nominally the G_d, but EL_H produces the Goddess, while the IM designates a mulitple masculine ending.  In our world, the manifested world, when a group of men is united by a singular inspiration we have the makings of a cultural movement. Until quite recently, in fact from antiquity up until the modern era, it was the muses who were understood to regulate the arts and sciences.

    In the modern era only Duchamp held to that belief. Isn’t it odd that the man considered to be the father of conceptualism was in fact held fast by a singular idea. I boldly italicize this word to stress its rarity within the mind, which itself is an unending swamp of mere thoughts. It’s funny how many of us confuse the ONE idea with the many thoughts! In Duchamp’s case his singular masterpiece is “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even,” commonly refered to as “The Large Glass.”  According to Duchamp’s notes it is the tale of an arbor type virgin Goddess, who possesses a “point of malice.” So be forewarned. Putting together the fragmentary notes one gathers that she journeys from virgin to Bride and finally inspires a group of nine men, her “Celibataires.” Duchamp mentions that originally the group was
composed of eight individuals, but in keeping with his notion of  “three” Marcel finally included himself as a “Station Master” and the group became “89”. Duchamp clearly understood that the sacred and the profane were but two sides of a single coin, whose connecting edge was the wittily erotic.  For example, he playfully tells us that the Bachelors are connected “by their point of sex.” It is more than interesting to notice, as you look at the  registration tracing, you find there are within her form eight suspiciously appearing phallic prongs.

Empowering the Image: SHE comes 4^th

   Dear Recipient, I confess that I felt compelled to distribute her image in 3D. I immediately created an anaglyphic drawing in red and green. I had twenty sets of red/green cardboard spectacles from another project. Because of the drawing’s large format, 18 x 24 inches, I had it transferred to a flash drive. Unhappy with the standard printed 3D effect, I returned home and slipped the drive into its USB port. I opened the image in Photoshop to see if I could fine-tune the color intensities. No luck, they were locked in place.  Experimenting, I hit the command key INVERT. Everything changed: SHE entered her true realm.

    On the computer screen what had been white became black, green gave way to magenta, and red turned into cyan. Most exciting was at each intersection, where the colors crossed over each other, a white light appeared in place of the dark line that gave the original anaglyph its 3D effect. When I put on the colored spectacles SHE coalesced into a single light and came forward.  I removed the glasses and stepped back.  The electric cyan and magenta immediately turned into a shimmering violet within the eye. SHE belongs to the quick high-frequency ultraviolet realm of the Goddess Aurora, the first hint of dawn’s light.

   Marcel Duchamp only dealt in what he referred to as a superior aesthetic. In assessing the modern era he reminds us that in earlier times “painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral” and then he added, “…our whole century is completely retinal… It’s absolutely ridiculous. It has to change: it hasn’t always been like this.” After years of study, I assure you that Duchamp would not have made these statements unless within his own body of work we could find all that he held dear.  So, who is his Bride? When I decoded the “tri-cipher” that accompanied “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors…” it exposed the idea that “, Even” (SHE) can, shall or must wheel and deal. Does SHE combine aspects of the Greek goddesses Tyche and Nemesis, who spin the wheel of fate that bestows fortune or rights iniquity? After Duchamp, we can certainly be “stripped bare” of the narrow confines placed on art in the modern world. Through Duchamp, art could once again reflect the totality of the human condition and challenge us to a meaningful dialog.

Invoking The Image: SHE comes 4^th

   The dictionary defines the word “invoke” as a way to petition for help or support. It is also to call forth.  The result of invoking the Elohim is to empower community. Ironically, as an individual, you can also be empowered by community. As a lifelong student of art history, I see that under the banner of community Western society flourished during the Middle Ages. The great monasteries and hermitages kept language and literacy intact, as the Arts, through the nameless guilds of Europe, flowered in the majesty and glory of the Gothic Cathedrals. When I say nameless I mean as opposed to our modern sense of self.  One survived the medieval period as Jack of York. Then journeyed into the Renaissance and individuated by re-birth in a “baptism” of signature: Mr. John C. York. With this renewed sense of value as an individual we have traveled up until this very moment. In the West being an individual has been nourished as the end goal. This has led us to our present dilemma. The goal is depleted, the very soil of individuation can no longer sustain a valuable society, and the entirety of this situation was clearly reflected in the world of Andy Warhol, who ironically produced at the center of his own commune: Warhol’s Factory. His droll assessment: “In the future everyone will have his or her fifteen minutes of fame,” summed it up. Art history records the birth of modern personality through Giotto, when the gaze in a mural figure looked at us and we felt seen. Centuries later the complexity of personality reached its apogee with such masterpieces as “Las Meninas“ by Velázquez with its engagement of us as spectator placed directly in the path of that which is being observed.  Several more centuries passed when the quest of identity was thrown a curve with the advent of photography, which democratized the situation by leveling our search of self into a simple matter of appearances.  Finally Warhol shows us our overblown sense of self worth when he exposed us with an instant Polaroid image, which he blew up, traced, and then cosmetically smeared with silkscreen inks. The great glow of personality, after achieving individual value represented by signature, ends with Warhol’s feigned fawning over a celebrity’s autograph.

    We need to be guided into a new world, where the achievement of becoming an individual is celebrated as part of something larger. This wholeness must be greater then the sum of us, its parts. Like a new dawn, a true synergy is coming, which the world has yet to see. So we need to look up and petition the greater universal intelligence for guidance. My path through Duchamp leads me to petition the true Elohim, realizing her feminine identity can no longer be swept aside, for SHE champions fellowship and seeks partnership with us. As the feminine aspect within the Deity, SHE has been greatly suppressed and it is up to each of us to recognize our immediate need for her presence in the world.

The Kabbalah, the practice of Jewish mysticism recognizes that G_d has both masculine and feminine aspects. The very name of YHWH contains a balancing of the divine dual nature. As within the word Elohim, it is the presence of the letter H (hei) that designates the presence of the feminine. At this moment we recognize the need to stress in YHWH, the second H, the 4^th letter that reflects continuity with her mother, represented by the first H in the second position. It is the younger feminine aspect that will shed her light into our world. 
   At this moment I feel her presence in my life because her appearance within my tracing was transcendental.  The writer Rabbi Harav Ginsburgh in his classic work The Hebrew Letter: Channels of Creative Consciousness examines the letter hei.  Essentially the letter hei “expresses revelation of self in the act of giving one self to another.” Further he shares with us “… the secret of the letter hei, the gift itself is the relation and expression of self, drawing the receiver into the essence of the giver. It all centers on the gap, the empty space between the long horizontal above, which the rabbi explains as “the line to thought and … the unattached left foot to action.” He then talks about a gap between thoughts and deeds, which, as an artist, I’m all too aware. One is “Often…unable to realize his inner intentions. Other times he is surprised by unexpected success. In both cases he feels the hand of God directing his deeds. The gap is the experience of the Divine Nothing, the source of all Creation in deed: Something from Nothing. “ I realize the Rabbi is teaching about the general exchanges between two people: one receives, the other gives. In this particular case the gift is literally an icon. The gap is the essence of emptiness that draws me towards SHE, the mysterious, and enigmatic other, which sets my mind on fire.

     Marcel Duchamp explained part of what I’m simultaneously dealing with in the text of a talk he gave titled “The Creative Act.” He describes “a subjective chain of events…” an artist goes through “…from the intention to the realization.” He says: “The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.” He declares that an artist for all intents and purposes is placed in a “mediumistic role.”

    Duchamp says the artist is only half the Creative Act. He supplies the ”… personal expression of art ‘à l’état brut,’ that is, still in a raw state, which must be ‘refined’ as pure sugar from molasses, by the spectator…The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place.”

    I’m realizing, as I prepare to send this image out into the world, that this time SHE is the maker.  I am simply her first spectator.  Her apparition is the great by-product.  What I made intentionally was a registration tracing. The next morning that registration lay under sheets of glass, as they became Tony’s memorial.  It is the recognition of the unintended, but expressed, which will not let me go. I glanced over my shoulder three months ago. Now SHE is driving, which is more than OK. 

    Surprisingly, after thirty- four years my inner gift is not depleted, in fact it seems to expand.  With sure footing, a year after hanging my bottle on its rack, I find myself busy as I “refine” this image that SHE transmitted to me. SHE is now a combo pack composed of poster/flash drive, as well as a set of 3D glasses for your enjoyment, and this missive.  SHE has been multiplied into her harmonic of 9.9999999 ad infinitum. Poetically, like a shotgun blast, I’m about to scatter 99 of these into my world. My dream is that many will make her their “pin-up” as well as plug her into USB ports and accept her as the world’s first screensavior. Some might even take a moment to read this message. If luck is with me in hitting my target, a handful will look and remember as I did when I glanced over my shoulder.

                                                                                 

                         Smiling towards you,
                                                       John


John McNamara>mac2u22@hotmail.com