Being an artist is a glamorous lie.
The idea of “being” an artist - as a profession, as an identifier within our particular social environment - depends on the absolute that art is something special which some people do and others don’t.
My hunger has led me to ridiculous places in search of nourishment. For example, some friends and I once snuck into a small talk being given by the author Chris Kraus for a cohort of MFA students. In this talk she claimed something along the lines of, ‘you all are here because you’re special, because you care about art. You care about making things, and you care about your ideas - but people out there, people who don’t write, who don’t paint, who go about their daily lives solely consuming, they live sad interior lives’. For a quick, staggering moment it felt true. How sad it must be to not be an artist, yes, what a dismal and flat interiority that must be.
And then almost immediately I got a wave of nausea at the sentiment. It struck me as one of the most classist and deluded forms of flattery you could try to cover artists and writers in training looking for real-world guidance with. People ”choose” to be consumers as much as they “choose” to be born - it is, largely, a role one falls into if they live in a consumerist society. This is because consumption is the only way of relating to life which the society, and those who are for it, professes is possible, and aspirational, for an individual’s life. From birth to adulthood, the structure justifies itself and implicates anyone within it to identify with it. Should enough contradictions of the society’s mythology make themselves apparent, one might then be motivated to exist against it. To identify with it is simply to live one’s life within the ideals, values, and mythology of the environment. To not identify with it is to think for oneself, to consider what kind of world one wants to live in, and orient one’s life in accordance with the actions necessary to help bring forth its existence. This is not a minor feat, and many delude themselves into thinking they are paving their own way when in reality they are simply replicating the very models they have been given by the society.
Many may feel called to dream, or to identify as a dreamer, an artist, a free-thinker, a dissident -if you will- but to do this without one’s efforts being completely subsumed or rerouted by the forces of a society’s influence requires the abandonment of an investment in enjoying the benefits of its social contract.
However few they may be, to exist in accordance with the definitions of success laid out by the social environment brings one closer to reaping the benefits of the social contract, and thus justifying the externally defined purpose given to one’s existence. In being against it, one is seemingly left with 2 options.
1. Destroy. Rage quit, leave society (literally, or metaphorically) through civic death, suicide, immigration, etc.
2. Play with a self-defined purpose. This will likely be inherently opposed to the one given. Nurture its vision relentlessly. Protect it from the incessant onslaught of external influence concerned with and tuned to the ideals and visions of a society it aims to oppose.
There may seem to be two options, but I actually think destruction inevitably leads to the need for self-defined purpose. In a way, both options are sides of the same coin. Destruction may seem like the easiest orientation to take to counter oppressive systems, but it comes with the necessity to nurture something in the absence it creates because it [destruction] is not an absolute in and of itself. Pursuing it as an absolute is how we get fascism. Pursuing growth, as opposed to nurturing, is also how we get fascism. This is like Peter Thiel and all the technocrats pillaging the world’s clean water and air in pursuit of “technological advancement” at the benefit of economic growth’s whole thing right now. I digress. Back to smaller villains. Back to Chris Kraus.
Half of the room seemed hypnotized - charmed into a passive stupor by her mild celebrity, and the other I couldn’t read. I sneaked blank-faced glances at my friend sitting a few seats over, only mildly engaging the muscles around my eyes to convey I was grimacing at the ordeal. She genuinely seemed to believe, and wanted to convey in good faith, that because this group of young people were getting MFAs they were somehow inherently different (with the judgment of: better) than all other persons, including other artists, that weren’t pursuing an MFA. As if the MFA wasn’t just another form of consumption. As if it stood outside the boundaries of the logic of participating in society, in the MFA to better produce objects within the society in order to better make money off the endeavor to then use to consume. She seemed to genuinely believe that the interiority of the people in the room was more valuable, more important, than those outside it, and that the interiority of those who don't express it through “the arts” is impoverished compared to those who do. That the interiority of career artists is somehow more special than non-artists.
She was doing them a favor. To Kraus, art is something special which some people do and others don't. Her reinforcing of this belief in this cohort of MFA students would create a beautiful delusion to carry them through their post-grad years (or to some hypothetical point of deconstruction where they might reckon with the fact that it's not the whole truth). In that moment she reinforced their artistic egos with a nice set of assumptions and judgments regarding themselves and others; she was solidifying their identities as artists - a distinct class - as a part of something bigger and more meaningful than whatever others were participating in, and she created this other as something which these artists could exist against - distinctly, and unique from.
The issue I took with Kraus’ vocal-fried-confessions of classism is it denied the realities of the potential of the human spirit being influenced, if not wholly determined, by the material conditions surrounding the body in which the spirit is enclosed. Marx’s historical materialism posits that, “human beings derive meaning from their material conditions and the products they create, asserting that these relationships are never static. Marx argued that internal conflicts arise from the evolving means and relations of production, leading to broader political and social transformations”. It makes sense to me that Kraus justifies her role as an artist, and thus other artists, as a result of a “special mind” that, for some reason, cares about ideas and is more deeply engaged with reality than others. That there’s this mystical distance maintained between a perspective towards art as an avenue for self-expression, self-grandization, and profitability. For the same reason that it makes sense to me that Peter Thiel thinks his experience working at a law firm for 7 years and then choosing to leave to become a supervillain proves that people who are stuck using all of their waking hours working to pay rent, and pay off debt, and simply survive can just someday choose to become supervillains too. It’s the same reductionist, capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps non-sense we’ve been beaten over the head with since the dawn of totalitarian agriculture. There are those who take life by the horns, and tame it, and those who are losers. I don’t have the desire to compile all the evidence widely available to contest this brutish sentiment. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you throw at a brut - if brut want smash, brut will smash. But if we want to live, we have to find ways to keep bruts from smashing the things we care about, and build structures that aren’t controlled or hijackable by bruts.
~ ~ ~ Everything is not as it seems
Art, and its appreciation, is a natural activity - like breathing, and walking - something which we are inclined to engage in during leisurely time. It is an activity which follows from being moved by our environments. The artistic or creative impulse has been around long before society as we understand it and is currently organized. This means art has existed before ideas of capital, and of high vs low. It’s an impulse which can even be observed in animals other than humans - which leads me to believe it is an impulse inherent to life. The level of intention with which different forms of life may be able to approach art and creativity (at least in my present understanding of subjectivities) varies greatly. The momentum of a group of cells being moved by the activation of Cdk1-cyclin B1, a protein complex thought to begin the process of mitosis, is, I would argue, a creative act; this act, however, according to prevailing models, is seemingly mechanistic in a way which human creativity is not. If we are to deal with the matter of human creativity, we will have to deal with intention (much to the dismay of the horde of artists and critics who seem to be content wading in the waters of meaninglessness and passive-ideation where simply the gesture has become a work of art [it is art, just not a very “good” one - which is fine! One can make “bad” art - but we shouldn’t aspire to “bad” art. And personally, I hate seeing people demand praise for “bad” art - but maybe that’s just me! Okay, aside over]).
Humans across cultures, environments, and history appreciate and create art; though it’s evolutionary purpose is not as (seemingly) straightforward as that of cell division, or breathing, because it is not as (seemingly) mechanistic and life-affirming, it is obvious that its prevalence is an indicator of life concerned with, sensitive to, and motivated by matters beyond just survival; it is an indicator of a sensitivity to something immaterial, to beauty, phenomena which our anthropocentric and efficiency-concerned models of questioning and value frameworks (mainly “science”, economics, and white supremacy in the U.S.) continuously discredit and consider an externality. This is a result of a culture thrown out of balance by an overwhelming supposition of gross materialism, “a belief system that considers only physical matter as real, neglecting spiritual truths”.
These anthropocentric, gross, and efficiency-concerned frameworks are lenses which we put over our thinking to justify our ways of living. The logics of technofascism, economics, the pseudosciences of bioessentialism and race-science, are not absolute truths of nature - they are loose stories we tell ourselves which may seem to aspire to describe systems, aspire to true scientific theories and observations of organization, but which center the circulation of money, power, and control - all at the cost of life and truth. These stories appeal to us as guiding lights of thought because they seem to aspire to “science”, “objectivity”, “true observation” - things we’ve typically perceived as virtuous, and inarguably good things for humanity which have allowed us to “evolve” and “take control of the raw material of life” for the last 10,000 years or so - yet purposely exclude or warp vital information which disproves their verity. This is mythology. For instance, in economics, anything beyond the realm of “raw material” and value are disregarded as “externalities” - including things like environmental cycles, global warming temperatures, societal distress, etc. Despite the fact that these factors directly impact the possibility for life, and thus economic activity, or even more superficially, the availability of natural materials, resources, and life to be used as materials or act as agents which define economic activity, if it reveals the unsustainability of our current understandings of human motivation, the economy, etc, it is purposely disregarded.
For some reason, we largely put up with this arrangement of things. We may find ourselves frustrated by our societal structures and ideological restraints, but we sooner default to pointing blame - at others, at ourselves, at the fundamental makeup of the species - as a way of evading the harder work of critical analysis; of evading contemplating on the possibilities reflected back to us by our current and formative environments, and what our desires for that to look like actually are; of evading acting on those visions of an appealing future and working with the present to make them a reality. We attempt to alleviate the symptoms of our stressful life structures as opposed to confronting the absurdity of their arrangements at the root. We see the evidence that something is very wrong! We are devolving [de-evolving, regressing] into forms of authoritarianism and fascism, and we keep trying to fix the easily accessible issues, to put a bandaid on things and hide the evidence of a deeper problem, as opposed to getting down and dirty and finding what’s actually wrong. I think we do this because to truly look what is wrong in the face and address it completely would require tremendous change on our parts. What is wrong is simple. Frustratingly so. Our dominating ways of life - our extractive, costly, modern lifestyles - are unsustainable for all life on this planet. Ourselves included. To continue on as we are doing as a species, claiming we are still orienting ourselves towards the good of all, towards improving our conditions of life, while burning and destroying our capacities for life, well-
Trying to “do something about it”, while simultaneously trying to maintain the unsustainable lifestyle in a state of good consciousness by ignoring the problem, or trying to scapegoat it, is like trying to create a math formula, finding an inconsistency in it which disproves the legitimacy of the proof you thought you’d discovered, and instead of taking that inconsistency into account and allowing it to re-route your efforts, you continue miscalculating by pretending you didn’t see the blunder and continuing on as you did before its revelation. Fascists are really good at this. So are technocrats. And liberals. Our capitalist, neoliberal, imperial, manifest-destiny ass, relentless-endless-growth, and expansion focused societies are oriented around capital, economic activity, consumerism, and war. We are taught to derive our meaning and purpose for being alive from acquiring and accumulating things, maintaining and enjoying the surplus of resources we have stolen from others, and doing everything in our power to justify this way of being. This wide-spread mythology of purpose and motivation has been seeded in us through thorough indoctrination in messaging from all different angles. Our environments and the stories most easily accessible to us echo on and on, this is as good as it gets, make the most of it. It is your right, and your duty, to take, take, take. In this model, this way of seeing the world, where capital and “more” is God, where the accumulation and consolidation of capital, and power into the hands of fewer and fewer at and by the cost of quality and viability of life for others is not only an inevitability, but the intention, art is overwhelmingly perceived to be only as good as its ability to facilitate that process. For large organizing systems like corporations and governments, yes, but also by individual artists just aspiring to get their piece of the pie.
Art, however, is a necessity for the continuation of life. Not the continued consolidation of capital, or power, of course, but definitely life. Where and when these efficiency-concerned frameworks cannot use art to create material change, and/or reinforce their own philosophical authority, they deem it frivolous. Those that (and I say this in as good of faith as I can muster) subconsciously cling to both the futurity of the framework and the lie that they want change create reductionist, sentimental, and patronizing justifications for its existence. In other words, these frameworks cannot take art seriously. To do so would threaten the foundations of the logic that give these frameworks credence. My suspicions are that if we were to study art, with a rigorous focus on understanding how it affects our physiological states of being, we would find it is, like most regularly recurring phenomenons in systems of life, a regulatory tool which allows us to accommodate information into our worldviews - to catch up internally with changes reflected in our environment, allowing us to see more clearly, and thus move and adapt more clearly. In other words, with intention; in alignment with our intuitive guidance and how it responds to external stimuli; sensory information which informs the feedback loop of homeostasis. Think of the dysregulated nervous system; under an excess of accumulated stress it creates a positive feedback loop in its attentiveness to any and all threats, immediate or hypothetical, thus creating more stress, and on and on. A desensitized aesthetic faculty is likely to mislead in a similar way. These systems are not isolated from one another - they work in tandem through delicate and elaborate communication cues. The nervous system soothed by the sight of something beautiful is only capable of feeling that effect because of the brain’s physiological response to perceiving beauty, which is then moved to release dopamine, which then sends various signals throughout the body to constrict or relax blood vessels, and affect insulin production, the shifts of which are registered by the body as information which then feeds back into the nervous system which continues to adjust to the changing information.
This isn’t a new line of inquiry - what manipulating stimuli can do to elicit different responses of human biological systems. I open this line of thinking in this piece because it has led me to the most neutral definition of what art is: a phenomenon which enacts change. Art is also something we make. So it is an intentionally crafted phenomenon which enacts change. This definition makes it abundantly obvious to me that art contains a tremendous amount of power. I don’t mean this sentimentally, I mean literally - art is full of power, and the potential for change, in the same way that molecules interact with one another and have the potential to rip each other apart in order to come together in new ways. This power raises matters of morality- power, and thus art (as a medium for the flux of influence and power), can be used to create, nurture, and destroy.
The drawings, poems, and songs we compose and keep to ourselves are as much art as the sculptures, paintings, and photographs we may choose to share with others - however, the potential for impact of the work changes drastically between the art we make for ourselves to understand our own relationship to the world, and the art we make with the intention of sharing with others, to share our experiences and perspectives on incidents which we have perceived and been moved by.
When I imagine ideal pieces of artwork, I imagine projects which are connected by an ambition towards studying the implications of art as controlled stimuli capable of enacting change, and crafting around those findings; creating something which is not just an anesthetic for the pain of our time, or indulgent navel-gazing at the hopelessness around us, or a pacifying vehicle for escapism into a realm of hedonistic pleasure - but refining a tool which reveals to those engaging with the work the potential of the self and creates the conditions which assist in the self-actualization, healing, or liberation of those engaging with the work, encouraging them to pick up the revelation and create something with its momentum and edge.
It is completely within reason that we can assume that if there are artists who have had the realization that art can enact change and have directed that realization towards a particular aim (in this case, helping others free themselves of externally defined purpose), that there are also artists who have had this realization and wielded these tools for other purposes; with the intention of selling and making money, seducing, collecting praise, influencing opinions, mobilizing (or immobilizing) people, etc. Though the intention of works can be manipulated through the setting which art is displayed in, there is a lot of power in the minds and intentions of artists; the perspectives they cultivate and imbue their works with. And there is even more power in our gaze as viewers.
We have the power to make choices in what we give our attention to. Artists know this. They must wield the elements at their ready so as to give you something you may want to pay attention to, to become permeable to. Some of them are willing to lie to you. Some of us are willing to be lied to, as long as it's immediately enjoyable, or satisfies some other desire. Our politicians are artists of sorts. Their elements are words and sentiments. They stoke the fervor of the people, the structures of logic, to influence public opinion. To reflect our desires back to us and offer cheap, unsustainable thrills and “solutions” to our very real problems. To manufacture consent for their own agendas by creating stories that implicate the masses, that suggest it is in their best interest to persecute some group or other, and that this will bring prosperity, prestige, a solid identity one can lean on as the member of a “great” nation. To craft a narrative, a myth - of themselves, a nation, their role in and on the nation - where you are implicated; through an invitation to surrender your own subjectivity to reap its meager benefits, a proclamation of your enemyhood through the scapegoat process, or identified as a dissident to the myth by choosing to oppose the relinquishment of your own subjectivity. The technocrats do it too. In their story you’re either going to be helping them with their “revolutionary” visions of terra-forming Mars and re-structuring private equity to bitcoin or whatever non-sense it is their working on at any given moment to funnel money and attention away from life itself. Personally, I don’t like being lied to. At this point they don’t even bother telling you it's gonna make your life better though. I’m also not fond of lying. And I believe in the values of cooperative societies that aim to nurture the conditions which make life sustainable, prosperous, safe, equal, and possible for all.
For these reasons, I believe in art that is created by a motivation and belief in the cultivation of life and the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. I see no other way of making art like this than by going into the act of making knowing you are taking on the role of a cosmic artisan, and doing so because you have glimpsed a potential, a future, a glimmer of beauty and understanding of the interconnectivity of all life and systems, and wanted to share that with others to better attune ourselves as a collective to the rhythms of the world and life around us so that we may better align with its best aspects.
There is no easier way to deconstruct the illusions, mythology, and contradictions artists weave around themselves and their works than to contextualize them and their motivations within the art market. Personally, I go to art with a faith-full heart, looking for connection and reflections on experiences about life, and though I can accept that there is always an aspect of the work that will be influenced by its existence within a market, I struggle to stomach art made in bad faith - with a predominant concern for being palatable and marketable. It is life-force which gets funneled happily into the night of commodification - exchanging the potential for change and inspiration in order to reap the rewards of a social contract with an economic system which seeks only to take what it can from you, including, eventually, the very meager rewards you engaged in it for.
My thesis is simple: Reject the role of the artist. Someday, we will be able to be artists again - but, for now, the artist is a self-indulgent, glamorous lie we tell ourselves to feel better about rejecting the societal death-drive, while secretly bowing our heads to it and reaping its benefits. Aspire for more. Your task, should you be one who feels called to working with materials, who is haunted by ideas floating in the unmaterialized, haunted to the point of needing and making active attempts at materializing them somehow, is to look at the world around you and figure out which ideas want to live. Get quiet within yourself. Very quiet. Quiet enough that you begin to hear where the thoughts and ideas that seem to spring spontaneously from you actually come from. When you’ve seen where that well of ideas comes from, begin the creative work of discerning which ideas are concerned with your expansion, and which ones are concerned with your contracting. The contracting ones are concerned with death. The expanding ones are concerned with life. Attack the contracting ones. Cultivate the ones concerned with life. Not because its “right”, or “good” - but because you are alive, and you can not deny that as a fact. You are alive, and despite whatever protestations you may have against the pains and troubles of being alive, a fact of your being is that your body’s mechanisms want to live. The fact that you cannot stop your breath, that you cannot stop your heart, that you cannot think yourself a black hole to suck yourself out of existence without external intervention means that you, your discrete existing self, are not privy to the secrets of the universe - and yet, you exist. Not just as a modem, or a machine, but as a being with the capacity to feel things, and to influence feelings. Humble yourself before life, accept that it is here, and respect it by being in it.
For the sake of your freedom, of your existence, and for the sake of the existence of life on Earth as a whole, you must imbue your life with meaning, and values, and continuously exercise your will to do so. Someone will always be ready to do so for you, and will impose their meaning onto you - whether you create your own or not. They will assign you a meaning foreign to yourself. The meaning they ascribe you might be death. Someday someone may tell you your purpose is simply to be sacrificed. You must be an artisan. Not a celebrity, not a collector, not an icon, or an idol - these are all things which may or may not be projected upon you in your pursuit of creation, but you must be an artisan. You must look at the tools and material available to you, contemplate what is there, envision what you want to be there, and then move in harmony with those visions. Begin with what is most immediately apparent. Your psyche is there, and there are parts of it which have been arranged for you. You have been taught to care and value certain things, and there are things you have been taught to fear. Understand them all to be bricks building a larger structure. Is it arranged to your liking? If it were up to you, is this what it would look like?
~ ~ ~
The Lover and Beloved Present us with…
Desire, Drama, and Cultural Conditioning: Interrogating Narrative Constructs
“The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.” -Robert Pirsig
Art, attitudes, customs, groups of cells - culture comes from and through us, filling the space of consciousness with the transmutations of ideas. When power is deferred to it, culture guides the emergence of our assumptions about reality, and in doing so, manages our perceptions. There is no way of communicating which does not interact with cultural systems, therefore even an attempt at making culture more transparent by exposing its mechanisms can enforce those very mechanisms. This is elementary, it is also terrifying - that so many of us willingly, even eagerly, give our senses over to a culture created outside of ourselves and which so pathetically attempts to “reflect” back to us a cheap depiction of what we’re capable of, what realities are worth putting into story, what our givens should be - of what we’ve experienced, observed, and yearn to communicate.
Using culture is convoluted business. Language - spoken, written, visual - has a will of its own that it’s eager to impose. We must understand the foundations of our cultures to anticipate and redirect attention and efforts when we are getting lost in or recreating its form in different projections. This is, at least, if we care to arrive at a place where we are capable of imagining ways of being for ourselves that do not recreate logical systems that depend on violence to sustain themselves. This includes internal and external violence - including, but not limited to, forms of denial, extraction, erasure, humiliation, repression, and suppression.
Art is not simply a vehicle for escapism, or something to spread across and decorate a surface - to reduce it down to such is to dull the blade, to defang a thing with beastly radical potential for changing attitudes, assumptions, and mobilizing movement. Art is capable of pointedly confronting our internal monologues. An artifact created not merely as a self-justified piece (painter’s painting #45) but as a part of a greater whole, an orchestra where people come in and out to keep a rumbling hum going. Right now I hear and am interested in resonating/singing, “we we we will be free”.
Culture is in and of everything. It is something like an interface through which we learn to interact with the currents of reality - but to imagine new configurations requires ripping off our ill-fitting training wheels. Sometimes fashioning new vehicles. Sometimes doing away with the roads entirely and considering what it means to desire movement in the first place. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Art is incredibly ordinary.
It is a human activity, much like breathing.
How far can you expand your awareness?
How much can you sit with?
Ideas exist before their reception at the human level. If they are received by systems of consciousness, subsequently engaging with the processes of “being”, then they are experienced as thoughts, language, or sources of input into sensory systems. One of my favorite words these days is gnosis. It means knowledge - particularly that of spiritual mysteries. I believe creative inspiration, and the result of art, is the experience of glimpsing gnosis (or truth, choose-your-trip) and following its momentum to what our nature deems logical, and/or has the capacity to follow through on. As an artist you can concentrate the elements available to you in the world in such a way to create something which can allow someone else a glimpse of an undiluted idea, truth, or nugget of gnosis which you’ve experienced. It is something like lightning, electricity - or falling in love. The strike is not the beloved, or the muse, or the idea - they are not doing anything (other than existing) - but the beloved, or the muse, or the idea is the human experience of the strike; it is an interface through which we can experience a glimpse of truth. Then, usually for the creative, follows the attempt at apprehending the immaterial thing which had transformed or touched their perception. The artist gets to be a romantic and swim in the play between beauty and chaos. I don’t think we should all strive to be artists, though - I think we should strive towards clear perception and intentional action: to see that energy, and do our best with what we have to ground it, and direct its currents in such a way that the force of that felt truth can spread rhizomatically - illuminating our interconnectivity.
There is no such thing as a perfect work of art. When engaging with work we can approach it through an adopted system of values (my favorite one to use is lazy/rigorous work - a spectrum which runs on multiple axes including composition, material, ideology, etc.), but we can also choose to perceive work as something like a phenomenon - an event. A moment serving as a bookmark for an idea to be expanded from. I’m particularly interested in works that invite this mode of engagement; that open up reality in a way which allows one to converse with parts of themselves, others, and their shared environments in ways they didn’t have access to before. A “reflection” - one which we approach knowing it to be not a literal mirror, but an arrangement of particles which we are invited to engage with until we can rearrange our internal furniture to accommodate the existence of this thing, in its totality, along with the rest of reality.
This is something like catharsis - however the matter of language here is important and the word ‘catharsis’ leads us into a form of psychological treatment I am not interested in using here. Coming from the greek “katharos”, meaning pure, and “katharein”, meaning “to cleanse”, the modern english term “catharsis” is loaded with ideas of purgation, the separation of pure from impure - and here we find a logic of alienation as opposed to integration. The term, and process, holds potential to create a container through which one may feel safe to approach and/or learn how to feel feelings they’re disconnected from, or afraid to face head on - however, catharsis has a built-in goal to get rid of the emotions and ideas being conjured. I think it serves us all more to move from and with curiosity towards a greater sense of inclusion. Not necessarily towards a generative relationality, where we find the logical structures of extractive capitalism, or a forced intimacy with others, where we bypass the need for community and trust - but one which settles into an acceptance and celebration of co-existence.
Perhaps we can entertain the ideas and processes of divination as something to hold open the space here.
“What Cornell sought in his walks in the city, the fortune-tellers already practiced in their parlors. Faces bent over cards, coffee dregs, crystals; divination by contemplation of surfaces which stimulate inner visions and poetic faculties.
De Chirico says: ‘One can deduce and conclude that every object has two aspects: one current one, which we see nearly always and which is seen by men in general; and the other, which is spectral and metaphysical and seen only by rare individuals in moments of clairvoyance…’
He’s right. Here comes the bruja, dressed in black, her lips and fingernails painted blood-red. She saw into the murderer’s lovesick heart, and now its your turn, mister.”2
-Joseph Cornell, Charles Simic
If a cathartic perspective is one which renders the encounter with a body of work as instructional in discarding (a Follow-the-Dotted-Line of How-to-Feel Uncomfortable-Feelings and be Relieved-of-Them in 10-Easy-Steps!), perhaps a divinatory perspective can be one which renders the encounter overall neutral, observational, and rooted in our as-it-isness (Here is What I See, I Will Not Tell You What It Means Because That is a Decision You Must Make).
A side note:
Another framework which we can approach the reflective quality of art works with is that of BDSM. Instead of conjuring feelings and archetypes for the sake of feeling and then purging them from our imaginations, what if we actively marinated and played within them - rendering what once repulsed us into something we can understand as closely as we do the the very feeling of erotic desire? Accepting the binds and limitations of our very bodies and remaining present in the feeling of it straining against itself, trying to expand into, grasp, or understand that which feels as if it stands right outside of reach.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experi- enced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self- respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
-Audre Lorde
The language and mythic structures proliferated through popular culture act as the primary palette through which the public is limited to organize, think and speak about their internal reality. The consumption (both passive and active) of entertainment and media in the form of movies, tv-shows, songs, social media content, and advertisements is a considerable portion of an average person’s daily information intake. We are most thoroughly indoctrinated into our societies not through curated school curriculums, state-sponsored propaganda, or the threat of and execution of physical violence - but through the media which surrounds us - the stories we’re told growing up, the music we’re forced to listen to, the art curated in museums for us to contemplate, etc. This information is what forms our assumptions and perceptions of the world - moment to moment - and the palette is too limiting.
We sooner default to pathologizing our human-dramas, or reducing overwhelming experiences to the closest approximations our pattern-recognition hungry brains can think of, and though I’d like to believe there is something inherently human about narrativizing our lives in this way, I think it is insidious to do so using the archetypes, narratives, and language authored and proliferated by a largely imperialist power and its cultural agents (both the intentional and unintentional). In doing so, we bind ourselves to its ideologies, and entrench ourselves in its logic. Instead, it would serve us well to make sense of and integrate our life experiences in a way which is conducive to a flexible and sober perception of reality. The palette of popular culture is not interested in sobriety - it is interested in drama, stupor, and power.
This palette encourages experiences to fragment, rather than to change - externalizing the phenomenon of our life and reinforcing logical routes which position experiences as things that happen to us as opposed to by and through. I see a parallel in the way we use the internet. Though it is a wide, sprawling, and ever-changing network, the average user spends most of their time across 5 main platforms: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The hyper-localized attention on these platforms reinforces their power, and our relationship to them is almost entirely defined on their terms: passive and limited. The patterns we are given as referential frameworks through popular culture structurally bind us to recreate the structures of societies whose values we may fundamentally disagree with, but whose will gets imposed unto us.
What’s an eye/”I”/i to do?
“Like capitalism
It works like unrequited love that way
It never rests
Just like I need the love I'm not getting from you
And all the people in the world
Are in-between you and I in that way
And in the way of love”
-Jenny Hval
In popular culture the word “desire” is used to describe a spectrum of hues of drives. It is a shorthand for the experience of both wanting and wishing for something. Less an emotion, and more a lens through which to interpret and collapse a thought process. The conflation of want and wish installs a set of assumptions into the word desire - mainly the implication that the experience of wanting is logically tied to wishing for an outcome, and that want can be satisfied (done away with) by acquiring the desired thing. Desire, then, is a thing adjacent to acquisition, possession, control, power. It is a dualistic structure through which to create and then experience an interpersonal dynamic. It separates the thing doing the wanting from what it wants, and gamifies drive (motivation), promising satisfaction. This is, of course, a false promise.
Desire can not be satisfied through means perceived as external to the self (especially when the desired thing is a person); acquisition is only part of the wish. Desire is a trap - a mechanism which justifies itself - much like the logic of capitalism. The truth which ”I want” points to is the vacuum created through an unsatisfied need requiring tending in order to return to a state of wholeness. This tending, however, is not usually as straightforward as giving ourselves what we think we want. Wholeness is a state of being, not a possession, which is sustained through a consistent sensing and kneading of the knots which contract our senses of being and disconnect us from the experience of wholeness - of co-existence with the present and everything in it. The implications of believing that what we want is truly what will satisfy us, but being unaware of how those wants are pushed onto us from external programming are that we live lives believing we are lacking something simply because we are told we should want something: the newest fashions, a house, marriage, the democratic candidate, etc.
“The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.”
-Anne Carson
The forces of individual desire reverberate far and wide beyond our bodies, and thus we are constantly being influenced by and influencing cultural narratives around love, lust, want - for things, ideas, and yes - people. It is incredibly difficult to disentangle ourselves from cultural conditioning, and though we may grow attuned to behaving in certain ways in particular spheres of our lives based on our ideals and values (actively feeling, filtering, and perceiving cultural phenomenons with intention) our personal desires are often not given the same diligence, or valued as being revelatory to what our underlying and subconscious programming may be. There is a wealth of knowledge, however, available in zooming in on the narratives which we project onto our interpersonal dynamics, especially those which revolve around our wants and desires. The amount of energy we can invest in these endeavors, whether consciously or unconsciously, tells us that they matter to us. The cultural obsessions which we have in telling and retelling certain stories where we find satisfaction in projecting ourselves into the shoes of protagonists going through trajectories of romantic dramas should also matter to us. That large spectors of our lives are influenced by a referential network we’ve built primarily through cultural material which is meant to entertain, not educate or enrich, should be something we consider just as seriously as the impact of our diets on our physical health. It is no small thing that the intensity and pervasiveness of tortured romantic narratives and monogamous courtship in culture structurally dooms us to recreate models which fuel dissatisfaction.
Why do we love art about doomed romance? Why do we love stories about unrequited romance? Fated lovers? And-They-Lived-Happily-Ever-Afters? Slow-burns? She-Rescues-Him-Right-Backs?
The Cult of Romanticism: The Lover and Beloved
At the core of the gravitational body of the Cult of Romanticism is the dualistic structure of the Lover and Beloved. Though the lover and beloved are separate entities, their existence as either/or is dependent on the existence of the other. The beloved is created through the lover’s gaze, and the lover is created in the moment of perceiving the beloved. In this sense, the lover and beloved are made for and through each other.
Though the lover and the beloved are people, their personhood is only marginally relevant to their existence as agents of “love” (a neutral force/emanation (a, one of many) from which potential realities can manifest themselves from). These matters of creation occur in a separate realm from the linear and isolated human perception of being. Though the physical body and world - physical reality, the passions, etc. - are implicated in the process of emanation, primarily in their role of giving consciousness an interface through which to experience the physical effects of love’s force, I am more concerned with the matter and mechanics of the causal plane and beyond. Those spaces where archetypes and ideas are untethered to individualized identities, but where their movements dance and imprint on the individual level, manifesting through a myriad of displays which we interpret through a pantheon of dramas and narratives. These are the things which most often distract and disturb us, but whose currents we surrender to instead of trying to understand how we are being implicated, and then acting accordingly with enough space to harness awareness and intention.
The cult of romanticism is not some conspiratorial entity like the Illuminati - it is what I would consider to be a gravitational entity - a non-corporeal thought form co-created by generations of artists, poets, lovers and writers whose assumptions and works have touched others and initiated them into ways of seeing the world which proliferate these assumptions about reality and romance. Think of the lover/beloved duality as a script of sorts, a version of the hero’s myth, which exists in the collective unconscious and occasionally manifests in bodies, guiding people through the motions of this dynamic (See also: projective identification).
Though the beloved is a person of their own, their status as a ‘beloved’ requires no action on their part - the lover is moved into existing as ‘the lover’ through coming into contact with the beloved.
“At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: [Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me.]. At that moment the animate spirit, which dwelleth in the lofty chamber whither all the senses carry their perceptions, was filled with wonder, and speaking more especially unto the spirits of the eyes, said these words: [Your beatitude hath now been made manifest unto you]. At that moment the natural spirit, which dwelleth there where our nourishment is administered, began to weep, and in weeping said these words: [Woe is me! for that often I shall be disturbed from this time forth]!”
-Dante
At the spawning point of love a portal opens up for the lover, through which a divinity we are perpetually connected to and made from makes itself visible through a form (it need not be a person, but for the attempts of this essay, we will be primarily referring to it as such). It’s almost as if through a person, God goes “peek-a-boo!” to someone else, and in that act of revelation, the two forms are transformed - a force is enacted upon them. For better, or for worse, the beloved comes into being as such to the lover. From this point of creation, a new potential builds.
“For where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components-lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible on the triangular path where volts are moving, that would not be visible without the three-part structure. The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy. The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies…”
-Carson (17)
The semi-enlightened agent, someone tuned to the mystic nature of reality but who continues to interface with the world through the perspective of the will, of volition, remains aware of the limitations of human consciousness in perceiving the entirety of the reality that is unfolding - that the beloved is not actually God, or separate from the self - but allows the light of beauty and truth making itself known through a form to become a guide towards which the lover will asymptotically approach. The goal? Something like the feeling of an internal proximity to God. Unity. Wholeness.
“Is that not just engulfment? Like, codependency,” a friend quips while I yap in a coffee shop about where I’m at in writing this essay.
“Mmm, I don't think it is…I think it’s different. I think it can be conflated with engulfment, and like, merging with the other,” I begin - working out some of the thoughts then and there with them “but I think it’s different. In that the goal of engulfment is an oceanic identification with the beloved - it's about the potential of the satisfaction of the desire through an almost cannibalistic consumption of the other, or a surrendering of will and resting in the other. But the wholeness which the semi-enlightened agent is drawn towards is one of non-duality - the very concept of the other is, to them, an obvious knot working against relaxing into a sense of internal wholeness. They know that eventually they must release the idea of the beloved, because they know it to be illusory.”
“[Carl G. Jung on the birth of the hero] The appealing element in those myths and related tales, for Jung, is that the heroes' search for the Pearl of the World or the Grail really symbolizes our own search for meaning. The ‘treasure hard to find,’ as he calls it, is in fact the knowledge of and mastery over the unconscious processes and desires. The wish for immortality commonly shared by mythical heroes must be viewed symbolically. Growing old with less and less awareness of the self means slowly losing a grip on life. And this psychological awareness is what heroes seem to intuit. Their ‘immortality’ is already within themselves but not yet fully detected. The search of the hero, Jung concludes, is really for himself ‘newborn from the dark maternal cave of the unconscious where he was
stranded.” Lacocque (220-221)
Be gentle with the unenlightened agent, for they are in a vulnerable position. At any moment, they could be thrown off the horse of beauty and left to reckon with the void. Though this is a threat to the semi-enlightened agent as well, the unenlightened agent is someone who has likely not made contact with that emptiness St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” details, or is not interested in the narrative of the initiation rite of deconstruction, yet finds themselves thrown into it anyways:
Dark Night of the Soul
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised
–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.
In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my
heart.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–
A place where none appeared.
Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
The semi-enlightened agent will be aware the forms they perceive are a result of physical reality, of gross bodies and karma, and though they will allow themselves to experience the human drama of grief and yearning, they will have a fire of faith to hold them over through the gradual seeing-through of falling away of illusory human gods (including the form of the beloved). To the unenlightened agent, however, physical reality is all there is. The gravity of the human drama of grief and yearning for the mythic beloved may leave the person unable to come back to themselves and a reality they feel they can continue writing and being present within. Left with their senses suspended, and consciousness scrambling in the dark of an emotional storm, they are left untethered from their sense of self and thus unable to reconnect with their own internal sense of wholeness.
“...unfortunately human nature is such that it hates hard work, especially when it comes to changing old personal habits, as pathological as they may be. Like Jonah, we are reluctant to acknowledge something we already know: that the meaning of our lives ultimately lies in actively participating in and contributing to life with our best talents and potentialities. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Jonah complex consists in refusing to act upon such values.” Lacocque (225-226)
Ideally, at the end of initiation, the form of the beloved and the lover falls away. The person who witnessed the drama of the narrative is capable of returning to reality better understanding how and why they were acted upon by the external forces of romance and desire. This experience allows them to witness first hand how the conceptual mind creates the experience of reality and how the internal awareness, the seed of consciousness, is separate from those mechanisms. How desire and want and motivated action is all a part of conceptual thought, and there are other levels of awareness beyond those that render the idea of them, as absolutes, untrue.
“All the relative notions tied to the ego rediscover their peaceful source deeply buried under all the different states.” Daniel Odier (4)
It’s cause we be on those damn phones…
This kind of resolution, of integration, however is not the trajectory we’re encouraged to follow through the predominant narratives in popular culture. We are not given mythological structures to mirror and attain a sense of wholeness through internal resolution of conflict. We are seldom encouraged to maneuver through life without absolutes, remaining curious, open, present and aware enough to observe our positionalities long enough for all the chatter of projection to settle and allow us to hear both our external environments, and what comes from inside of us. We are taught to look outside of ourselves for answers, for satisfaction. To pursue, endlessly. To pursue for the sake of pursuit. Anne Carson writes about this in Eros the Bittersweet. She writes:
“Pursuit and flight are a topos of Greek erotic poetry and iconography from the archaic period onward. It is noteworthy that, within such conventional scenes, the moment of ideal desire on which vase-painters as well as poets are inclined to focus is not the moment of the coup de foudre, not the moment when the beloved’s arms open to the lover, not the moment when the two unite in happiness. What is pictured is the moment when the beloved turns and runs. The verb pheugein (‘to flee’) and diokein (‘to pursue’) are a fixed item in the technical erotic vocabulary of the poets, several of whom admit they they prefer pursuit to capture…it [eros/desire] knows only to pursue what flees…” Carson (20)
The proliferation of this dualistic perspective of love and desire through culture creates assumptions and paths for us which lead us to recreate these very structures. Should we be lucky enough to enter into satisfying partnerships that aren’t based on stoking the flames of desire through chasing, we may find we recreate these structures in different aspects of our lives. Desire is, after all, not merely a romantic force.
It is in the interest of capitalism that we do not question the insatiable nature of desire. That we continue to want and unquestionably pursue those desires, consuming and using what we get our hands on, and then discarding it to continue pursuing the next thing; To identify ourselves with things outside of ourselves, continuously go out in search of those things, and use them to fill ourselves up. To “complete” ourselves. The length of the pursuit cycle continues to shrink - trends coming and going in the span of a week, our dopamine hungry brains scrolling for hours through short-form content waiting to feel something against our numbed internal landscape, partnership and courting reduced down to hook-ups and power-plays.
In contemplating the labyrinthine pathways of desire and cultural influence, we encounter the intertwined narratives of the lover and the beloved, each shaping and reshaping our perceptions of reality. From the gravitational pull of the Cult of Romanticism to the insatiable nature of desire perpetuated by capitalist structures, we find ourselves entangled in webs of longing and pursuit. Yet, amidst these complexities, there exists a beacon of awareness - an invitation to examine the stories we consume and create, both externally and internally. Through lucid introspection, we confront the ephemeral nature of the beloved and the illusory promises of satisfaction through acquisition. We come to understand that desire, far from being a straightforward pursuit, is a multifaceted force that transcends the boundaries of the self. As we gaze upon the human drama with a blend of humor and reverence, let us hear the plea to be discerning storytellers - conscious of the narratives that shape our perceptions and intentional in the tales we weave for ourselves. For in this awareness lies the potential for liberation from the confines of cultural conditioning and the cultivation of a more authentic relationship with desire, one rooted in curiosity, presence, and the recognition of our interconnectedness. So, as we navigate the ever-shifting landscapes of consciousness and culture, may we remain loyal to the sense of responsibility to question, reimagine, and co-create the stories that shape our shared reality.
Footnotes:
Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Vintage, 2014.
Simic, Charles. “I Went to the Gypsy.” Dime-Store Alchemy The Art of Joseph Cornell, NYRB, pp. 26–26.
Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic : the Erotic as Power. 1978.
Hval, Jenny. “The Great Undressing.”, Spotify.
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton University Press, 1986. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv117. Accessed Apr. 2024.
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Vita Nuova. Milano :Feltrinelli, 1993
Lacocque, Pierre-E. “Fear of Engulfment and the Problem of Identity.” Journal of Religion and Health, vol. 23, no. 3, 1984, pp. 218–28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27505784. Accessed 29 Apr. 2024.
St. John of the Cross. The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. Translated by David Lewis. London: Thomas Baker, 1908.
Odier, Daniel. “The Chant of the Sacred Vibration.” Translated by Clare Frock, Inner Traditions, 2005.