Category: Goby’s Journal

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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

What does it matter?

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Soon, when the last human has joined the earth, the wind will clatter broken plastic cups across asphalt, into the weeds chocking what had once been a busy street where young trees are reclaiming cities as forests. Of the animals and plants that have survived, none will think the worst of us, none will remember or care. None will blame us for the disaster we brought on ourselves, and on so many others of the living, and once living. None with think us wrong… or right. What will remain, will be neither good nor bad. Our brief span of a million years or so will pass with none to mourn or celebrate our frantic, violent sojourn on this planet.
We are of no importance… except to ourselves. The domesticated animals and plants, the symbiotic, the parasitic, viral and fungal bacterial diseases unique to us, will adapt and change, or vanish with us. It will not matter that we chose to shake our fists at the universe for a few seconds, chose to commit suicide out of stupidity and spite. It really won’t matter. Not at all.
Think about it.

The Death of Art

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I wrote the following as a comment to a post on Levi Bryant’s Larval Subjects <TheWalkingDead>

This is something I’ve been trying to get my head around for a long time—what it means for an artist or poet to live in a  time without ‘posterity’. Hazlitt’s essay on Fame is the clearest statement I can think of for what we have lost. For Hazlitt, ‘fame’ was nothing like what that word has come to signify in popular usage, which is nothing more than contemporary notoriety; it was rather the consolation and hope for poets and artists unrecognized in their own time, who lived in obscurity, whose only reward was their investment in a belief that future generations will surely bestow on them the recognition they deserve, a belief that found support in the company of all the great artists and poets of the past. A kind of immortality akin to that of the Greek heroes of the Iliad. Even when this wasn’t as plainly articulated as it was with Hazlitt’s romantics, it has been present in one form or another, always—for as long as there been such a thing as Art. Walk through a museum. Thumb through the pages of a book on the history of art. Read Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes. There would be your confirmation.

This is an idea that has a history older than history itself—drawing, before the written word, from oral traditions, stories and legends of the ancestors. But who can believe in such a thing now? –hiding in its pockets, as it does—its untenable teleological assumptions—some dreamt up culmination of the human story… or a future that has no end.

This is what the Death of God means to art, to the making of art. I feel this as something so immense, so important—that I’m a loss for how to think about it, how to express it. I suppose, for those who count success as material reward and notoriety, the very noise generated by of their misplaced desire is enough to mask the loss—but it doesn’t erase its effects. The noise of a Contemporary without a Present, exposes the truth… or the lie, as does the frantic, almost hysterical obsession with defending (even while erasing) ‘creativity’ –by demonstrating its usefulness, showing how it’s but another part of our blind collective frenzy to own control and commodify every last living cell and atomic particle in the accessible universe… what are these, but replacements for the old, dead transcendence with which we wrapped– and called upon to justify the erotic jouissance of our childish play–all that we have left now, of what we used to call “Art”? Because Art doesn’t exist without that false transcendence, without what was purchased with that belief in posterity and all that it assumed.

Art is as Dead as God.

And after the fear, the feeling of something precious lost—comes a sense of tremendous relief… terrifying in its own way… but relief! There is no one watching from above… no unborn critics holding our future hostage, waiting in eternally suspended judgment the works of our imagination… where we once had ART… what we have now – is but play, a joyful play that preserves us—for however long or short our stay on this transient planet, in a childhood we need never grow up or out of.

This Book Was Goby’s… now it’s yours.

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If I had kept all the books that have rested on shelves where I’ve lived— I’d likely have near 10,000. Maybe more. With each move, the first thing I would do in the new house, apartment or room, would be to find places for the bookcases, unpack the books and put them in order.

When I moved from the efficiency on Morris Street to the Ox, I had more than 40 boxes of books. Each trip up the stairs I wondered what I would have done had I not left so many behind. It had always been a great comfort to me, having my walls lined with books, but something began to change over the next two years. They came to feel like, if not a burden, an anchor holding me in place when I felt a growing need to free myself of Things. I began to weed and cull my library—and by the time I left the Ox, I had maybe 200 books, fewer than I’d had with me since I lived in the garage where I’d set up my pottery almost 40 years ago.

For the past few weeks I’ve been on an obsessive reading binge. Done little else. Reading all day and hours past midnight. I need to take a breather. I have work to do—my art, writing. I looked at the stack of recently finished books—some new, some picked up from bins in front of A-Space. My room is quite small. I don’t even have room for a bed (not that I need or want one, certainly no room for another bookcase, and I feel no desire to hold on to these books—to turn them into possessions. Why not give them away? Return them to the A-Space bins. Leave them on sidewalk for others to find and read? And while I’m at it… go through the books I have—there are some I will never give away, my poetry books, books that are that dear to me, like old friends—sort out those I could leave in the bins at A-Space, or on the sidewalk with a GIVE THEM HOMES! sign.

I picked up Lillith’s Brood, which I’d just finished: three novels in three days. Wrote inside the cover:

This was Goby’s book
… and now it’s yours.

I imagined how a personal library might be, not a permanent, expanding collection—but a place where books might stay only while they were being read, for some… longer, for a few, longer still. A waystation for most.

And that’s what I think I will do.

Maybe that’s what I should do with my art… leave it on the curb with the books.

Goby’s Journal, Words are more than what they name

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9/20/11
Wednesday Rain. Light rain. Barely noticeable as rain. But one sees the sidewalks are water stained. The rain has altered their color. We look at them and say, they are wet, & others will know what we mean. They will be able, if they wish, to picture wet sidewalks. Wet Concrete or brick or paving stone or asphalt—picture this in mind, or perhaps the feel underfoot if you are a child & barefoot, or very poor and have no shoes, or the soles are worn through & your socks and feet are wet so what those words call to mind is not the fact of rain which your body feels and is all too real without words, but rather what you think of are warm dry socks & warm dry feet, and isn’t there a kind of rule to be seen in this, a rule first of all of mind, & then of words—that we apply mind and words not to what is immediately before us—this dull gray light, these wet sidewalks, wet streets, light rain—but to what is absent, to what is brought to mind because it’s beyond us, thinking on the coldest day only of how to stay warm, or in the hottest summer afternoon we remember the mild spring breeze, long for brisk autumn afternoons—and even now, among dry stalks of corn or walking over cracked earth weeks or months into a killing drought—this very rain, the sound & feel of it—will waken the parched thoughts of those thirsting for all they want & need & do not have.

Message to Bernie Sanders

Bernie, just cause you grew up in near lily white NH… I mean… I read stuff Bernie says, and it’s like he’s talking to a country that has no black people! I open my door, walk to 52nd Street, pass my neighbors and think, what is he saying to them? What does that mean here, in this neighborhood? Not like the economic message isn’t and wouldn’t matter, but why is it so relentlessly directed at WHITE people? Doesn’t he have ANY black advisors on his team? How can he go on and on an on, like the last few years, with all the revelations about cop violence on black lives, on black men (and women) disappeared into the prison new-slave archipelago–like in his speeches this doesn’t exist????
I mean, really… I imagine if I was knocking on doors like I did in ’08, in my own neighborhood… for Bernie… I wouldn’t know what to say! It’d be like, me, white dude, trying “explain” to people who have a keener political sense of reality that any 3 out of any 10,000 white people I’d ever likely encounter! Explaining.. why Bernie mattered! Jaysus fucking crisco.. what’s wrong with this guy?