I understand better what I feel when I think about the Consolation of Philosophy. Are we not as Boethius was, at the end of a world he could nor surrender, yet unable to imagine what might come after? I understand better, why I turn away from either, ‘realist’ fiction, or representational figuration in art; that world is no longer real—and no attempt to represent it now can hope to succeed.
We can look back at the works of the Renaissance, of the Enlightenment, like Boethius at the gateway of the Middle Ages looking back at the Classical world he knew was gone, hoping, through his translations, that he might preserve some memory of what it had been.
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This is our Dark Age. But the old world is too much with us, museums and libraries filled with its ghosts. We need to find the way to what is to come… but there is no way. No path. No prophetic guiding word or vision. And yet—if we wish to break free from the death grip of the old world, the death grip of endless repetition of the same, with word, or gesture or image, we have no choice but attempt to render—to image forth—that world we cannot yet imagine. We have no choice but to try, and fail. I see myself coming to this realization in my work—that what I’m doing, is bringing out an image of the new through the ruins of old—though only the ruins will be visible. Like Beckett, that’s the failure that draws me closer to the goal–failing better.
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Jacob Russell's Magic Names 