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

Points of Light

#1052

I picked up my painting from the Stonewall@50 show. Leaned against a column in the subway, waiting for the train. A man in a Septa uniform stopped… asked me about it.
“I used to do art,” he said. Train going by the other direction. Noise … couldn’t speak, waited.
“I had an art teacher in elementry school. She helped me. Made me feel I could do something. Entered me in a school contest… I was one of 3… in the whole school.”
–Do you still make art? I asked
“I took some classes at Fleischers.”
–Used to be free, I said. Not anymore.
I asked if he still made art.
” It’s all work now. No time.”
–I know. I wanted to be an artist. From time I was able to hold a crayon. Then when I was in my early 30’s, I took a 40 year detour. Took it up again when I was 70. Have made more than a thousand pieces since. Never too late.
“I saw this painting, and thought… there’s a reason it’s there for me to see. Thanks… you never know when you’re gonna find the kind of information you need. That you’ve been waiting for. ”
And my train came… and he left.

This was Soc Sec deposit day. Spent much of it, shopping. At the ACME, man in front of was pulling items from the bags they’d filled for him. Could see he didn’t have enough money. Saw a $20 bill he was holding…
I told him–how much you short?
” A dollar 20.”
I looked in my wallet. Empty! Cause I was gonna get cash back when I paid… but fished for change. Gave him what he needed. He was all.. give you phone and I can get it back to you…
I told him,  this has happened to me. And now you helped me pay back someone else’s kindness.  time will come. and someone will be there you can help in turn. That’s how it works, right? Or should? That’s the kind of world we want to live in, isn’t it?

This kinda thing happens. And I keep it to myself. I think…I don’t’ know what I think.. but it changes me, changes how I see things.
Invisible things nobody else sees. And no one else should see it.

But sometimes… it’s ok to share it.

 

Your children don’t have a chance in hell…

Read this. 

July.. yet another warmest ever month.

What are doing about it? What am I doing about it? I don’t know–but neither of us can do shit alone. We have to come together and shut everything down. EVERYTHING. Those in power are out to kill us all.. including themselves, if they weren’t too fucking stupid to see it.

There is no time for measured well thought out incremental actions.

It’s *%$$@ shit up and *&44^ shit down…. there’s nothing to lose. We’ve already lost!

Consider yourself already dead–no–look at your children if you have any–they are going to die miserably before their times. Because you didn’t do shit to stop this.

It will happen. Every second you hesitate to take up full scale revolutionary action–is condemning them to suffer what no generation has ever suffered before.. and never will again. Cause there’ll be no one left.

Overstory. Richard Powers

Image result for public doman photos Redwoods

A novel, where a character dies and revives — listening to voices no one else can hear. Where another is a parpalegic who spends his life coding and living in a cyber dream world, and yet another is married to silence at the death of his family. There is one on the autistic spectrum, who spends his life studying why people do what they do, and a scientist who is almost deaf, who goes years before anyone hears what she has learned. Yet another, felled by a stroke, who can manage only a slngle word at a time–and those, mostly unintelligible.

Whether fiction, or philosophy–or work of art–the one question that links auther, thinker, artist– to their work, the question that hovers over the work, informs everything else one might ask about it:

why did they do this?

What was the unspeakable, imageless, aporia of thought that formed the need and provocation to make this thing?

 

On p. 383, Ray–the character who has been stroked speechless–is thinking –while his wife reads to him from Anna Karenina:

<To be human is to confiuse a satifying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale,  and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compleeing as the struggles between a few lost people. >

Try again. Fail again. Fail better

When Death leaves a message–to remind us.

#1032

The sciatica hosptial visit–coming together with having to find a place to live, loosing Murphy, an emergency signal from my aunt in Southern Indian … I feel likeI something broke in me.

It was a facebook friend… and comrade… who saw my post on FB, and called 9-ll–persisted when they refused to understand what she was telling them! I had tried to lie down, thinking that if I could sleep, it would give time for this to resolve, but it was so painful I would scream every time I changed positions, and had difficulty standing again.
I couldn’t get down on hands and knees again to find sandles or flip-flops, managed to pull on shorts and a shirt, get down the stairs and open the front door, Barefoot. To wait for the EMT.

There was no one home. this is why I don’t want to live alone in an apt. even if I could afford it and didn’t need to split rent. I’m strong for my age, in relatively good health. I can take care of my needs: shopping, cooking, getting around walking and SEPTA–but one crisis away from a Very Bad End…. I think of Murphy under the table, dying alone in the neighbor’s yard.

Mind/body locked into crisis mode: which means, shut off the chronic anxiety and focused on survival. Noting, that FB played a key part. And not the first time. This is the world we’ve made for ourselves, where we are scattered by distance, dependence on work, or by poverty (which needs to be defined to describe what this has come to mean for our contempory lives) –and our closest community–those who will come to help if they are able, we seldom see face to face, because poverty is more than not having money.  We are in poverty when we are one crisis away from what we once called it, not for lack of money,  but for the destruction of community.

It doesn’t have to be, this way.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Comrades… we can make a better world. This one is not worth trying to save.

Deleuze On Francis Bacon

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

 

Francis Bacon’s painting is of a very special violence. Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overly facile detours, detours that the artist himself judges severely and condemns in his work. What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression. For example, a scream rent from us by a foreboding of invisible forces: “to paint the scream more than the horror…” In the end, Bacon’s Figures are not racked bodies at all, but ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of constraint and discomfort. A man ordered to sit still for hours on a narrow stool is bound to assume contorted postures. The violence of a hiccup…

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