Bad mouthing people is chickenshit; ennobling people is a gas (especially if you can do it without leaving tracks). Pain can be very educational, i’m not a very good student; there was one vacation i remember particularly, wherein my siblings thought it great sport to offer me money if i could last the 2 week journey without crying - i’m really glad i lost that money, but wish i was still that honest about what i feel. These essays are, in part, an effort to preserve that sensibility. Today i look around me at efforts by the social engineering “shot-callers” pulling the levers and cranks on this vast Rube-Goldberg digital contraption we are all so enamored of, and feel much like i did crawling into the bed of a prostitute, maybe my first, in Santa Ana, CA and wondering how there could be such a difference between my first loves and how we touched each other just a few short years earlier? As an art student in NYC i had the privilege of studying anatomy with a remarkable professor from an August family of Doctors who managed to make his general patrician contempt for all, seem specific to me, (a gift of the emotionally retarded) or so i imagined with my own outsized ego starved for love and attention. He posed a question to the students in my class which i doubt anyone but myself ever solved - more outsized ego, bullshit ·
“Why” he asked, “does a child, just learning to draw invariably show the eyes near the top of the head in its drawing?” - the answer came to me 4o years or so later; it is because of foreshortening - one of the thorniest issues for sincere artists to grasp, an intersection of what one has been trained to know and what one can see. Much like we puny humans loved in our parents arms, only to be introduced into a world of strife and cruelty - talk about your cognitive dissonance. The difficulty for me with my family is how people i was raised to share with; to love - to admire and defer to could be the same people who would betray my kindness, my confidence and my love for a meager advantage? It confused me as a child and it confuses me as an adult, an aged adult. My parents were intellectuals parroting all the popular progressive mantras of the time - outrage at the assassination of a sitting president by a cabal so entrenched that the lords of justice cowered before the truth.
Who’s kidding who - the digital overlords filtering the speech you pour into your feeble skullcaps to suit their nefarious whims, or the outraged hoards pounding at the gates of heaven - “give me liberty, or give me death”¿? What is reality; how is it parsed by what we have determined is “civilization”? Not very well as near as i can tell. In the year 2020 we are paying thugs to thug us, with the same lame guarantee, “the last Gr8 war” as soon as these mongrels _______ fill in the blank, are eliminated from the landscape - you will be safe once again. I struggle now with the accomplishment of my task - 5 paragraphs each day · But in the back of my mind i know, it is as dishonest as my siblings bribing me not to cry and so disturb their tranquil story of a family and its Arcadian journey toward stories that can be recounted and shared demonstrating some mythological solidarity with a happiness borne from compliance. I spit on your approbation and welcome my death as a relief from this festering lie that shackles the weakest i see each day and lauds the arrogant and most selfish i find, regardless of where i find myself on the planet.
We have available to us every instrument to feed, clothe and educate every man woman and child on the planet, but allow ourselves to be divided by fears that are solely resident within our own experience. I veer from you, not because i know anything about you or your struggles, but because it was what i have been taught by people looking to exploit my need for belonging. Ironically, the same affect you find most offensive about me - my reluctance to join in your frolic is the same affect that demonstrates as best i can my love and affection for you as a member of my same species. I do not cluster for fear, but from respect for your capacity to make your own judgements - conversely, my contempt and disregard for your opinion is based on your demonstrated need for support about what you think. I love to know others - i relish each opportunity to learn about the struggles of everyone i encounter and am as equally prepared to sever any union that yokes me to your agenda without your having asked - how do you feel about ____ fill in the blank.
I do not trust easily, and yet i do nothing but trust in every action of every person i encounter - except myself · that truth, however is changing the closer i move toward the death i will share with no one. Not because i am selfish or unwilling to share with those interested to learn what i have discovered, but because every discussion i have read about the experience, which in reality is, that that and birth, are the only things any of us do share. As much as i would want to discover language that might encourage you to fun, or love, or solidarity - you are alone as much as i am: no matter how popular you become, or beautiful you are acknowledged to be, there is no more knowledge you can learn or possess than what you can know about your own self and your ability to orient in a cosmology we presume to be reality, but in fact we can barely discern within the fabric of space and time we occupy. I can tell you this with candor and love; i wish you pleasure; i wish you comfort and i wish you deep experience in a place that seemingly presumes to know better than you what it is you find in front, around or on top of you - be well, be happy; comfort all you find · for it and they are you.
jts 04/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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