I dreamed… drempt… (never liked ‘dreamed’ as past tense. Just don’t sound right)… that I was painting. A very large–very long painting. Dream-voice said: good that you used your whole vocabulary of brush strokes. (Like with traditional Chinese paintings–different classes of strokes for … mountain, bamboo leaves, etc… only this was not representational). Then the thought-voice said Continue reading “Dream-voice. Dream-thought. Making art without the words.”
From Blackguard
Do you sometimes wonder–500 million years after the last human perishes in our current mass extinction, how, of those more resilient life forms, some may develop consciousness, learn to do science, and ponder in amazement at the remains that now and then emerge, of what kind of creatures must of made these things, and what happened to bring about about their end… some giant space object? Aliens? Will they entertain the idea that it was mass suicide–one that took so many other life forms with them? Will that give them pause to reflect on their own way of life, that they might not repeat our folly?
Spirit Stick: Photo by Lillian Dunn. The snake is a toilet paper tube, colored with crayons.
But are these powers real? you ask. Real, as imagination is real, as the world opens to us, yes, and we live within our wonder. Within—not outside examining, measuring, weighing from the cyclic year of endless drought, but timeless, or timeleaping making memories, our lives out of dreams—outing our dreams and finding them in things, the things we make and do: in poems, in art, in the work of our bodies. Now and then it happens, and we don’t know what it is that has happened—a feather and a sash on a walking stick becomes or was both dream and waking action, know it by how it persists, endures, the dream that comes again changing forms, begging recognition, understanding… not in explanation or translation (so called, interpretation), but in following where it leads.
9×11 watercolor, pen & ink
Putting the last few posts together.
I started muddling with the question of how, if we give up, or can no longer believe in the possibility of posterity–of how this effects what I do as an artist, given the central role this idea has played through the history of Euro-American traditions?
The problem was, I was thinking in terms of the individual. Such that–where an artist might once have imagined a future where his (not so much, if you were a woman) art would find a place, even if rejected in his own lifetime.
Perhaps that qualification (not so much for women), unlocks the puzzle. I mean, the way that idea has played out in the marginalization of women and minorities in the arts–because it has been part of a struggle, not for immediate recognition alone, but for a place in a mythic future. A struggle for and against erasure from collective memory–the arts (again, in Eruo-American traditions), being a repository of that collective memory. Every art museum is evidence of this.
So maybe it’s the struggle for collective memory that is my real interest here–a merging of personal identity into an imagined future collective one.
Isn’t this what we mean by ‘posterity?’
Understood as a field of conflict in the class wars, rather than primarily a struggle for the individual to earn a living, makes all the difference. The struggle to earn a living, then, to find a place for one’s art in the world, becomes something much greater, and the question about posterity–and how we are to think of our art in absence of this idea, isn’t about the absence of our belief in the future, but the necessity of erasing what that has meant up till now, if we are to begin to think clearly about the place of art in a post capitalist world.
Just playing with my new pens and #234 Borden & Riley paper.
The Great Disaster we’re all a part of isn’t the one in the headlines. It’s not a sudden catastrophe. A day of horror. An explosion on a street. Planes hurtling into high rises. It’s long and drawn out, incident after incident, law after law, arrest after arrest, murder after murder–none of which are the Great Disaster, but each are a part of it. More like a movement of tectonic plates–every tremor, every seismic event, is but the visible part of an imperceptible change of the landscape, of the shape of a continent. More like the melting of the Greenland icepack… we see the calving of the icebergs, as spectacular as they are, but not the rising of the oceans–which doesn’t happen in an hour or a day. I’m speaking of the end of this civilization… of all that’s been built on and dependent on the delusional machinery of capitalism and nation states that it created to serve it. We can feel it cumulatively… feel that everything is changing, the world as we have believed it be is already no more, but then… it looks not that much different than yesterday, or the day before, and we go about our lives, oblivious of the escalator of extinction we’re all riding together. inevitable as growing old… noticeable only when we look back a decade, or two or three, and see the marks of death written across our every feature.
In a letter, Emily Dickinson wrote: Nature–is a haunted house–but Art–a house that tries to be haunted.
@Poetry tweeted this quote, and I can’t get it out of my mind. Haunted–by what? A house that tries to be haunted, would seem to be empty–in need of being filled with… what it lacks, but nature has. Has, but as something which is and is not there. Nature’s house we did not contruct, but find ourselves within it. Are we, then, that which haunts it? And the house of Art, a strange sort of house, though we build it, we cannot dwell in it, as we do the house of nature. In our very building of it, it pushes away, keeps us outside, with every word we add, with ever new stroke of the brush, and though what we would render is within, what emerges is yet another surface, and other wall, another door, though we imagine it to be open, but cannot enter.
In nature’s house, we wait for death, and paint the house that refuses death entrance, and us… unless (ah, the paradox!) we empty ourselves of the death that haunts us, and enter, not as ourselves, but only with the emptiness of what we have become, when we have ceased becoming.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 