Credo
we must find stranger and stranger epithets for God
Some come to religion through tragedy. others through a love of beauty. lover of all things unlimited, even, plural, left, female, moving, crooked, dark, bad, oblong. love and fear: your beloved is chasing you through the woods, but you keep forgetting he is your lover and you mistake him for a bear, or for a mighty hunter; or maybe your beloved is a bear, or a hunter, and he keeps forgetting you are his beloved, and mistakes you for his prey. Be the dandy of ambiguities. On pain of losing yourself, love only that which overturns your order. Secular minds embrace mystical beliefs without noticing.
There are two Americas, the hidden one and the visible one. Everything good emerges from the hidden one. Out of the woodlands, the swamps, the bayous, the prairies like little woodland creatures scampering in the dark— seen as two glowing eyes in the dark, or tracks in the mud. Everything evil is from the visible one, the one that sends forth massive clouds of black miasma, pouring out from giant smoke stacks. You must never mistake one for the other, or conflate the two together. Contemporary painting is about the power and presence of light. Waking up and listening to Glenn Gould humming along while playing Bach while drinking coffee fixes the day into a perfect one. Everything you say is a veiled "I am" statement, but not in the obvious way. None of us really know who we are; we can't trust these statements, and we shouldn't be beholden to them either. Let your dreams die before they can become nightmares. Believe in the beauty of light pollution and how stars, in their absence, are more present and powerful than if they were visible. Too many people are obsessed with cultivating taste, neglecting their other senses, like sight and touch. An artist's work is primarily about its materials: paints (which they mix themselves), canvas (or whatever they paint on). Next, their work is about the form it takes, & the problem-solving the form requires. by the time you get to the content, the artist has likely forgotten or never gave much literal thought to it. Talent is sublimated rage. It is always the cynics who believe in the world too much, become too realist, obsessed with sacrifice and struggle, it's the opposite, it's all trailing behind the idea, you just have to have the courage to have, and follow, an idea but many rather choose the corruption of the world as some sort of “deeper” insight, a realism without ideas isn't an adequate account of reality
The cultivation of artifice and decorum as virtues proceeds from a blissful alienation from all life. It doesn't really make sense to want to be anything these days, everything is so precarious. You just do one project then the next. The physical experience of the city should be like entering a dream, a zone in which space and time constantly flex and dilate. Maybe the buildings could shift randomly, each day a new configuration. Cities spanning thousands of square miles. Sparse monuments and structures jutting out between colossal plazas. All architecture in classical and rationalist style. I have spent the lion's share of the past year reading, thinking and writing about the art of the Stone Age, with special emphasis on the paintings of the Chauvet Cave. The sea and the desert have been places of mutual enrichment among peoples and cultures for millennia. Woe to us if we turn them into graveyards where even hope dies! Let us free these tremendous reservoirs of history and the future from evil! Let us denounce and remove causes for despair, and let us oppose those who profit from the misfortune of others! An ocean of time separates us - can we even talk about it meaningfully? Perhaps only through poetry. We have to conjure powers we don't even know we have. Each time.
I'm at an empty park sitting on the dock in a swimsuit so I can sit, sunbathe, and listen to music. I notice a drone flying down the lake. 10 minutes later I look directly above me and there's the drone. Hovering and staring down at me. I shoo it away a little bit to let it know I know it's watching. It flies away. I start checking around at any flying bird to make sure it's not that drone again. A couple minutes later I scan the area and there it is. Hovering high and staring. It was purposefully trying to hide in my blind spot to keep watching me. I look directly at it and stare at it. It stares at me for a minute and then flies away. Concentration camps, annihilation camps, emblems wherein the invisible has made itself visible forever. All the distinctive features of a civilization are revealed or laid bare (“Work liberates,” “rehabilitation through work”). Work, in societies where, indeed, it is highly valued as the materialist process whereby the worker takes power, becomes the ultimate punishment: no longer is it just a matter of exploitation or of surplus-value; labor becomes the point at which all value comes to pieces and the “producer,” far from reproducing at least his labor force, is no longer even the reproducer of his life. For work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. And the workplace is everywhere; work time is all the time.
I love being rootless, I love having no country I can call home.
The whole world means less to me now than the way a voice familiar to you splits open the dark like a seed.
I think often about the image that opens Cha’s Dictee; words scrawled on the walls of a coal mine by Korean workers forced to labor under Japanese occupation. The simplicity of each of these wants and deprivations: I want to go to my hometown, I’m hungry, I miss you mother.