Category: Goby’s Journal

Depression… and the Consolation of Philosophy

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The Consolation of Philosophy. I’m not a philosopher. But I like to think about stuff. I like to think about… about how to be able to find ways of understanding my personal, intimate, most subjective feelings/experiences… in such a way that I can fit them into a more inclusive meaning. Being one who is periodically subject (right word) to depression… interesting… was going to say, “significant depressions” … though ‘insignificance’ is more the root of their… whatever.
But this habit…compulsion, of writing about, and describing, and thinking about… has, while it has never made the depressions less miserable or shortened their duration… it has probably saved my life more than once. And late in my stay on the planet–helped to make them, again, while no less pleasant–something akin to the rhythm of waking and sleep… the depression being… what? A waking nightmare, that I know I will awake from.
Surfing the mind… the Big Wave can kill you. but you gotta do it. And you get better at it. And you never know…

The Malevolent Desire for Recognition

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I have only to wire one more piece, and I’m ready to make a list of the art with numbers (and titles, if they have them), and I’m ready to take everything to O.U.R. Gallery for Saturday’s opening. Pulling everything out where I could see it—anticipating having it on display, set me to thinking about making art—and having it seen by others, how the pleasure from the first, and the unquenchable desire represented by the second—are irreconcilable. I think the latter is a good example of what Lacan meant by jouissance.

Would that I were capable of trashing each new piece on completion I think I would be the happier for it. I can’t suppress that wish—that my work be seen, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if it would only stop there, but wanting others to see what I do is impossibly entangled, no matter how I try to deny it, put it out of my head, starve the thought—with the malignant desire for … recognition. There… I said it.

I know perfectly well that this is a desire that can never be satisfied, because it externalizes something–seeks to answer a question that can only come from within oneself. Are these things that I make… are they any good? Do they have value? But no matter what anyone might say—not the highest praise from the most respected source can satisfy, because no one but one’s self can be a just judge of one’s own work. And all the worse—what prideful pleasure one might take from such praise, has to be resisted, shaken off, because if it takes hold, it will surely corrupt… turn a bitter poison to the soul. This is so, I suspect, because in seeking approval and confirmation for the work, we cannot separate that from seeking approval and confirmation for our own being… the creative work becomes a vehicle for our salvation. If only I can succeed, I will be saved! If only I can make a work of art worthy of (…. ? …. ) — But worthy of what? Of posterity? Like Hazlitt’s essay on fame? One might have believed that when it seemed there would be no end to human history until some divine resolution. Look how that—as an aesthetic idea—has dominated literary … oh, and musical production–that need for final resolution, the conclusion that wraps it all up and closes the book. How fragile that illusion has become—who put any serious stock in the idea of posterity in this age of thermonuclear weapons, global climate change, decimation of biodiversity, governance by the stupidest most self-serving and delusional of the species?

… and it never was more than an illusion, one that served the gatekeepers of class and privilege well… while keeping all but the tiniest minority locked out, controlled, suppressed. Like all the versions of paradise after death.

If I were writing in Hazlitt’s time, I’d be thinking about how to wrap this up…searching for that fine conclusion—for closure (there’s the word I was looking for! Closure)… but in a time so near the end, there can be no closure. Everything in medias res.

After Depression

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Depression never feels to me like sadness. More like a gag in my mouth, a choking inhibition, like trying to run in a dream when you can’t get your legs to move. But as it melts away, it leaves a quite particular sort of sadness in its place. Everything seems sad. Not terribly unpleasant. Like walking through the ruins after a great storm–not quite awake. How sad, you think… everything so still… and broken. Then you begin to see people hurrying here and there… all so busy. At what? it all seems so strange. Why, one asks. What is it that makes them go? The connecting cords, like a knitting unraveled… pick them up, one a time, until you’re part of it all again. More alive… but less intensely conscious.

What does it matter?

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My journal pages have come to be filled with sketches. Not art–by any means, but visual explorations and translations. Nudging words to the margins. I was thinking today… how I’ve come back to what I was doing in 1969. I took sketch books everywhere. Still have some of the pages. I don’t understand how I lost confidence… or came to think this was not something to continue. I draw everywhere now–whether I have paper and instruments or not. I look… and draw what I see in my mind. I care less about representing what I see, and more about the marks on the page. But the relationship is indispensable to the process.
The galleries were closed by the time I got to Old City. I spent some time browsing through a book, art and artifact shop on 2nd. Reproductions, throw-away art, some not so bad. So much of it. Yesterday I was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There it is. The stuff that’s rescued from oblivion… and the vastly greater volume of stuff that ends up in shops like this. The question that poisons everything: where in this do I belong? The nitrous fertilizer of false aspirations. Explosive.
Almost everything we are conditioned to think about art, about the creative process, is rank with this poison… the dramatic narrative we’ve been given by the psychotic capitalist nightmare–the misappropriation of aesthetic value as commodity.
I do what I must. My work may never see more than dust in basement where it accumulates… some of it, in those bins in that junk shop, if they survive that long. But that’s not the point. Not what matters.
The question remains… what does matter?

Continue reading “What does it matter?” →

Dream-voice. Dream-thought. Making art without the words.

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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.” →

Will they know what killed us?

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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?

Living in Imagination

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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.

Continue reading “Living in Imagination” →

Posterity Art & the Artist in a post-capitalist world.

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.

Riding the Escalator of Extinction

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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.