Author: wjacobr
Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell
My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics.
my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com
Everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the “Art World”
If We Are to Dream of Revolution, Let us Dream the Impossible
What is work but acceptance of death? The contradiction is too great. Procreation, the work of survival, are but submission to the reality that we will not last and must pass on our dying to the next generation. And the next. And the next.
Survival—that robs us of the impossible, of the intensity of living that is our truest desire.The contradiction is too great.
Look at those who are charged with ordering our lives for survival. The managers of survival. The Lords of Work. See how power accrues to them, and as it increases, reveals the master they serve, how more and more they are about Death’s work, till all our work paves the roads of war, genocide, and in the end—the suicide of our species.
What we cannot have, neither can we live without. In music, art, poetry—that which we cannot have, we can know, and not know; we can taste and feel and hear–if only in its absence–the impossible that is our true being.
It’s no accident, where utility and work and survival have become as gods, that the managers have become masters of war, that they rip music and art from our children, from our schools—that they turn artists into instruments of profit, turn art to their own ends–as propaganda, as anesthesia.
If we are to dream of revolution, let us dream the impossible—nothing less will set us free. Nothing less will restore us to our true Being.
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All that we have to do to sustain ourselves, denies us the Impossible Ecstatic Object of our desires. The paradox, that to sustain ourselves, we must reconcile ourselves to death and deny ourselves that which grants us the fullness of the illusion of immortality.
I’m perfectly serious when I say that the more power we have to sustain ourselves–which is, of course, power over nature, the more we (or those institutions and managers of sustaining power), become unconscious servants of death–possessed.
Their fear of the arts, and need to control and own them, the policing and punishment of erotic and ecstatic pleasures–these things are no accident. Economic, ideological and social theory are grossly inadequate to explain these historical patterns. Capitalism is itself less cause than symptom of deeper forces.
Time’s Prisoners: Nietzsche, Burroughs and the Rift
“Seeking the lost object of our desire we wander in labyrinths of unreasoning chaos like clowns in a fun house where the only release is to break through the clown not the mirror.”
Vengeance is the Law of the State
Killer cops are indited. I am pleased. How could I not be? But when they are sentenced, I feel an unease. an unease that has nothing to do with sympathy. Worse could come to them and I wouldn’t give it a second thought.
I can understand vengeance. I will never understand punishment. Punishment–which is the foundation of criminal law. This is the problem.
There is no greater cowardice than to consign vengeance, in the form of punishment, to the State… to the Law. And no greater evil.
Great Storms… .on being more and other
The image above is from damage left after a tornado that passed from Kansas, into Missouri and Kansas City, in 1957. A link at the head of this blog will take you to an account, and to the memories left by dozens of survivors in comments. I watched the great churning, half mile wide funnel approach in a state of wonder and awe so profound, it left no room for fear. This was the beginning of a life long fascination–I should better call it, an obsession, with tornadoes, hurricanes, great storms–something that stirs in me a kind of moral dissonance–a reminder, perhaps, that the appreciation of the sublime. there is something profoundly un-human. When I consider the passionate wonder these storms arouse in me–as though like calling unto like–I have to ask–“What is it, of that which I call my Self, that is itself–so Other, so alien, to all that I think of as human?”
Doing Art
Bed at 10:30. An odd sort of mood. Like being really agitated without being agitated. Blank. The emptiness of doing when all there is, is doing. Neither reward nor recognition, and such reward is reward for the wrong thing, and such recognition is nothing that matters. Not a bad state–it just is.
That fantasy of peddling a cart and never coming back… or going anywhere. But that’s where I am. What I’m doing. Not going anywhere. Standing in one place. Nothing moves or changes but the things I make, and if I stop I won’t exist. That’s the tricky part. Stop doing what? Only if it’s the right thing… the right doing. And no one can tell you what that is. And you can’t stop.
I glued and nailed to the stretchers of a canvas I’d primed: roofing. rusted mettle. shattered auto glass. Dirt. String. Art should show the world truly.
I need large needles with large eyes, large enough for some lovely, fine hemp cord I bought. I want to darn and sew stuff to a canvas.
Pointless. But do it because doing is all there is. Make and give the stuff away. Or paint over. Free art. Free. But it costs… everything.
Singapore: The Rational Society as Technocracy
Human beings, regrettable though it may be, are inherently vicious and have to be restrained from their viciousness.’ – Lee Kuan Yew
In a recent post Nick Land refers to an old essay by William Gibson Disneyland with the Death Penalty (1993) about the absolute rational society of Singapore, a technocratic City State transformed under the direction of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first premier. As one commentator tells us it was Yew’s unique destiny to construct a rational society, whose guiding vision was of a state that would not simply survive, but prevail by excelling. Superior intelligence, discipline, and ingenuity would substitute for resources. He summoned his compatriots to a duty that they had never previously perceived: first to clean up their city, then to dedicate it to overcome the initial hostility of their neighbors and their own ethnic divisions by superior performance.1
One could say that Singapore is the…
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Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING
By David Bayles & Ted Orland: Santa Cruz, CA & Eugen, Or. 1994 – 2000
Picked this up at the Faerie Pot Luck. Only 118 pages, but have never read anything better on what goes into making art, for an artist. The motivations, the distracting temptations–what constitutes the only possible reward to keep at it, to keep doing it. I’m a 74 year old artist, and have gone through all the phases of despair, stopping, starting again. This book made me weep with joy. I don’t know that I found much new here, new for me, that is, at this stage in my life and my art, but the confirmation for what I’ve struggled with over so many decades is like a blessed cool rain after a long drought. Would that I had read this book… had it existed, when I was 24.
The reviews on Goodreads either thought it was 5 star (like me)… or didn’t get it. I’d be interested in what other’s who’ve read it have to say about it. Comments welcome.
Consciousness ?
Is consciousness, then… an autopoietic system, and it’s most basic organic model… the cell? Aren’t all autopoietic systems, then.. conscious, in some degree? Social… political?
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 