Category: aphorisms

Colour Me Happy – Orange, from debiriley.com

I love her blog. Beautiful art, and always something to learn. She must be an AWESOME teacher. Her students are very lucky.  I linked THIS, because I’m feeling bliss, having spent the whole day painting–finished #379 (photo tomorrow)… even though orange is my ANXIETY COLOR!

I love the story of the origins of Indian Yellow… the sacred urine from the cow, the lush sensual color of the mango–synaesthesia– color you can taste!

I’m convinced that synaesthesia underlies all the arts.. the bed rock. How else is it, that we associate colors with emotions? I don’t.. quite… taste color. Or see sounds. But pretty close. And what would poetry be if not for the power of words to link all our senses?

You ask–what of conceptual poetry?

What of it? I’m no gatekeeper. I don’t make–or believe in rules that say what can or can’t be art, or poetry! But I think conceptual poetry draws on something of the power of fiction/crossed with philosophy: in that it conjures alternate realities… that is… alternate to our received and habitual ways of comprehending the world.

It’s the transgressing of boundaries that all forms of art have in common, sensual, imaginative, cognitive, and in this age of our Empire of Money & Death… Political!

If We Are to Dream of Revolution, Let us Dream the Impossible

filipino_casualties_on_the_first_day_of_war

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.
—–
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.