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

#1199 …The Mask… again

I did more work on this and ruined it. This is my attempt to save it.
11×14 pen & Ink, watercolor.

View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.

Getting Close…. to the end

Time for sleep.

I’ve been gearing up to turning 80. A turning point… each year is fraught… how much longer? Not… how much longer before I die, but before I’m no longer able to function in a way that makes life worth the effort… and it does take effort. More each year. Just to do the shit need to do to stay alive… and functioning.I’m way ahead of the game, for the most part–to look at me now (if it’s not too cold)… I could be on track for 100 + .. but the warning signs are multiplying, in my body… in the world around me. I don’t think I want to see what it will look like in another 20 years.. or 10.Not just turning 80.. but this sense of being so close to the end of human life on this planet… or any other.The rest… is silence.

Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens

Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai

Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage
by László Krasznahorkai, Ottilie Mulzet (Translation)
Jacob Russell‘s reviewFeb 15, 2021  ·  edit

I have just come to the last page of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Destruction and sorrow beneath the Heavens. What does it mean, to say that This is a great book? It left me in tears, with the feeling that all books… poems… works of art, are the same… the same, by their very difference. This is a book to read as you set out to write a poem, or make a painting, at the end of the world… a poem no one will survive to read a painting, no one will survive to see.

This is not a report of traveling through Southeast China. This is not about searching for the lost classical culture of Imperial China. This is a fable. An extended fable. A journey through labyrinth of questions, that are all the same question–all leading to … bird songs, tea…emptyness, and back to the beginning.

“A way a one a last a loved along the riverrun.”

There is always a way out of Suzhou… and before us, in the thick fog, supposedly there is somewhere: Jinhuashan.