Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Why draw?

In my art and writing I seek to expose the aesthetics of thought, be it scientific, religious or commonplace observation of day to day life that is governed by the habit of swimming in whatever mixture of linguistics and culture that you happen to be immersed in. All habitual thought is blinding. Even eternal questioning that is my vice.

There is an escapist self-aggrandizing trend in the arts that takes reality, truth, expression as something not unlike dough to be shaped by the artist's hand, the artists and the marketer of selfish abandon being one. It is a less obvious trend than blunt political propaganda, more subtle and more hypnotizing. In my art, I seek to destroy this.

I am a student of massage therapy, as it is one of the few professions whose entire value system is based on the respect of anther person's past, present and future, their space, their reality, their pain and their healing. It's one of the very few occupations that teaches you to be within reality and face it with your whole being rather than run, fix, mold, change, fight, categorize or endlessly purchase. The world of art has a lot to learn from this delicate yet powerful directness that is akin to the most direct of arts - music.

Of course this brings up an excuse to obsess over the marriage of form and content, but, if there is one thing you want to know that matters - in art, in massage, in life - it is simply this: your INTENT.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Dominican Republic





Domestic disturbance in the halls of Vishnu and Lakshmi.

Stand guard. Words have become unmanageable, sticking to every surface like dough that needs flour. In my mind, in my cunt, on the edges of my breath. The culture, the generational wisdom of the cells comprising my body, the lone needs of sentient and desireful organisms drowned and integrated inside the totality of me who has no idea how to answer their prayers, their pangs, their birth and death circulating in my bloodstream. Do I care for them? Am I their savior?

Release. Release, let go, let live and let be. Watch the sunrise and sunset so slow and majestic. Watch the spastic flies move like you have to be on coke to keep up with their biorhythm.

It’s July now. I am sitting and aging in a place named July.

Stand guard. You may collapse under pressure of such infinite beauty. The connection you feel is a word you seek safety in, but the truth is uncontainable.

Let go. Truth will fill you. But you’ll never break.

Does it matter? The cells that make me don’t know how I feel when your eyes eat me up, intense, magnetic. Do they know why I cry? They know they need some protein to survive. Do I know why they overwhelm all my governing bodies with petitions to handle their grievances, firing spasms up and down my traps? The Lesbos isles in my fallopian tubes, filled with an army that explodes into wailing and weeping every time they mourn the loss of their sister, who is flushed out of existence; then the next, then the next: body ossifies into it’s own rituals. Let it break… Let it break! Let it invert through the pain to the other side.

Stand guard. Pain is bad. I’m a bad god if I let my constituents suffer so.

Let it go. Release, breathe. Thought a spec in eternity, an instance of patterned twitching of something abstractly described as particles. My reality is such: breath, voice, sight, sound, smell, touch, love, rhythm. No further liberty is there than an instance of being, without a struggle towards anything, beside you. Storms of adoration stilled, droughts of doubt and yearning past, concerns forgotten. The way is the way. We can simply watch the sun.

Stop though. Through your love you want to create me. Am I in need of any more form than the infinity that limits me already? Count the beings that make me, their mouths and their greed. Do you love a monster with infinite minds, one blood emerging from the sum of all – and emerging boiling, for no reason other than that you decided to exist alongside my soul, in such beauty. Why torture me with your sunsets, with all the joys of you, when I can extinguish all into a dot of simultaneity, wherein there is no place for you to stand beside me and watch, for you won’t be apart. All one, all painless, all at once.

Let it go, love. Feel breath as breath, and love as love. Feel solitude as solitude. Through your love you want to destroy me, but we will come back to this conversation at the dawn of every Age. And we’ll forget whose side is which.