4″x5″ Pen&Ink With 1,500 pieces behind me, I think I can give myself
permission to do minimalist work… messages without words.
We are destroying our world in a different kind of World War.
Most of the casualties go uncounted.
There is a connection, if you can parse it.
I was born, June 22, 1941–it’s no mystery to me.
4″x4″ Pen & Ink, watercolor
A poem, like any work of art, is a message without words.
The poem has words, but the message does not. One cannot ‘interpret’ a poem. Only, respond to it.
The truest response, like the poem, like any work of art, will be a message without words,
A response may take the form of another poem, a dance, music, a critical study. All with messages, opening endlessly like nested Russian dolls. All without words.
5″x4″ Watercolor, ink.
5.5″x8″ Pen & Ink, watercolor.
12″x9″ Pen and Ink
Someone made a distinction between persons who perpetrate individual acts of violence, and those who cause comparable harm in making ‘business decisions.” I cannot twist my brain around that.
What makes the first, reprehensible, and the latter… not so much. Collateral damage, maybea?
What is a killing by organized crime? Drug traffickers, if not, a business decision?
Somehow, the LAW, sprinkles magic exoneration dust over those who deny life saving care. So something is wrong with the LAW itself–let’s skip ahead here–not LAWS– THE Law and the political/social structures that define and make it.
This leaves us facing a Giant Abstraction– a monster that is killing us selectively.
How does one fight an Abstraction, one that is perfectly constructed to dismantle and remake any contrary abstraction into its own image?
Maybe the only way, is to brush aside all those pretty words about morality, realizing that they aren’t about morality, but exemplary forms of defending the indefensible?
We need to think more deeply about what is moral, what is right and wrong, when immersed in a structure that owns the very language with which we think.
12″x16″ Pen and Ink
It’s not rhizomes… More like a tracery of lines in a cloud chamber, from every direction –if directions, existed–at points of conjunction, like ganglions… unconscious memory collective and individual meet and merge.
this is what I feel when I walk down the street. A part a great network that does not exclude the birds and insects, the trees..at first I wrote “newwork’… and it is, because what is new emerges, is created, in the convergences, bodily convergences. It is with our bodies we speak.
My unconscious speaks to me out of bird song and leaves rustling across the walk, out of the presence of everyone I pass–humans, unlike the trees and birds… clothed, masked, our naked reality, our naked truth, our embodied truth, hidden… almost always hidden dressed up in everything but what we are.
“A Withered Corsage…my crumpled heart…”
Collage, paper, watercolor, ink.
12”x16” Photo: Brad Crothers.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 