a largely ill-advised idea....

except perhaps for the above









pauvre Picasso

Frantisek Kupka

Frantisek Kupka
Frantisek Kupka, Money, 1899

Eugène Carrière

Eugène Carrière
Eugène Carrière, The Young Mothers, 1906

Frank Frazetta

Frank Frazetta
Frank Frazetta, 1981

FF...I hereby deign thee Symbolist Emeritus

Sea-Deep for My Tomorrow

Here I sit and think,
The conscious hand draws deep into a shifting well
And thrusting forth into the amber glow of mind
Through the dark robe of shivering night
Into the air of sweet censers burning
Out of some antenatal dream
A vision turning and languid in the golden light
Like some Sybaritic dancer flowing forth
In a refulgent efflorescence
That foaming and shimmering for a brief moment
Vanishes back into the smooth plenum
Of the everyday.

When we were young
In fields we ran across to a ruined palace-wall
While rolling clouds bloomed in the exuberant air.
Do you remember the shadows that danced in the breezy dome of groves
As colors played across your lips
And voices fanned the wind with a splendid ovation ?

In the stream, by the wood
Alone I stood.
As winter consumed the green feast of spring
Till black skeleton trees stood still and silent
In a shivering bone-orchard against a pale sky.

When we were young
And thoughts did wander.
We gathered in dale near brook
To sing and sip from the voluptuous
Abundance of our invincible youth
And unpractis'd hands fumbled to
Discover the soft contours of Eros' face.

For a moment I stand amidst these wind-scattered leaves,
These memories .
The lustrous passions that bloom and wither
In fields where flowers fade.
And with these words I consecrate the contents of my almoners pension.
Now pushed out on a floating pyre to sink once again into yesterday
They are buried sea-deep for my tomorrow.

Rex Nemorensis

Puvis de Chavannes

Puvis de Chavannes
Puvis de Chavannes, Young Girls at the Seaside, 1879

Puvis de Chavannes
Puvis de Chavannes, Hope, 1872

Franz von Stuck

Franz von Stuck
Franz von Stuck, Sin, 1893

Jean Delville

Jean Delville
Jean Delville, Satan's Treasures, 1895

Ilya Repin

Ilya Repin
Ilya Repin, Sadko, 1876

I have deigned the forthcoming month as "Symbolist Revival Month"

Georges de Feure
Georges de Feure, The Voice of Evil, 1895

Symbolism was largely a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, anti-idealistic movements which attempted to capture reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. These movements invited a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams; the path to Symbolism begins with that reaction. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before moving in the direction of Symbolism; for Huysmans, this change reflected his awakening interest in religion and spirituality.

In literature, the movement has its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. In the 1880s, the esthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. Distinct from the movement in literature, Symbolism in art represents an outgrowth of the darker, gothic, side of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, Symbolist art was static and hieratic.

Ferdinand Hodler
Ferdinand Hodler, Night, 1890

The Symbolist Manifesto
Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto ("Le Symbolisme", Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886) was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. Moréas announced that Symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal":

Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales.

(In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.)

Néstor
Néstor, Poem of the Atlantic, 1917

Oswald Spengler

passage cited in Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies

The Century of the Self

The Century of the Self asks deep questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses PR to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites a Wall Street banker as saying "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

If you only have time to watch one, make it part 3 

part 2


part 3


part 4

Who are we ?

What are we ?
What are we capable of ?
What is the meaning of all of this ?

I can't believe I've lived this long and have yet to decide on an answer to any of these questions. I know there are many stories to chose from, but none seems satisfactory and complete. Still, things do become increasingly clear as time goes by. I spent the last hour looking through my archives back to the first posts I made 2 years ago. I wish I started blogging ten years ago. If nothing else, there is a personal narrative from which to derive some sense of linear, euclidian order-limited as that may be. It's difficult, however, to augur much from this scattered mess of tea leaves. I have a much stronger sense of destiny than most I suppose. But the strength of these convictions is equally countered by the fuzziness and warped perceptions that surround all singularities. There is an event horizon beyond which no mortal can look. When the time comes to act, I will act. When the time comes to think, I shall think. I will always feel and will always try to live in the moment even as it slips away and vanishes into incomprehensibility. Miracles happen, but never in the way you thought they would.

Radical Anthropology

via social fiction:

Fresh from the press: Radical Anthropology Journal nr two. When going through the gallery of contributor-faces, the overwhelming impression is one of old marxists with unkept beards but all in the name of learning what being human is all about. This annual journal comes as a free download and one of the many things you can learn from this is that Chomsky is as sphinx-like in his scientific interviews as in his political ones.

Bart Exposito

Bart Exposito
Bart Exposito
Bart Exposito
Medieval Revival Phase

Hunter Stabler

Hunter Stabler

Hunter Stabler

Hunter Stabler

Hunter Stabler

Lines Written among the Euganean Hills

Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on
Day and night, and night and day,
Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel's track;
Whilst above, the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily,
And behind, the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o'er-brimming deep;
And sinks down, down, like that sleep
When the dreamer seems to be
Weltering through eternity;
And the dim low line before
Of a dark and distant shore
Still recedes, as ever still
Longing with divided will,
But no power to seek or shun,
He is ever drifted on
O'er the unreposing wave
To the haven of the grave.
What, if there no friends will greet;
What, if there no heart will meet
His with love's impatient beat;
Wander wheresoe'er he may,
Can he dream before that day
To find refuge from distress
In friendship's smile, in love's caress?
Then 'twill wreak him little woe
Whether such there be or no:
Senseless is the breast and cold
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve
That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortur'd lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December's bough.

On the beach of a northern sea
Which tempests shake eternally,
As once the wretch there lay to sleep,
Lies a solitary heap,
One white skull and seven dry bones,
On the margin of the stones,
Where a few gray rushes stand,
Boundaries of the sea and land:
Nor is heard one voice of wail
But the sea-mews, as they sail
O'er the billows of the gale;
Or the whirlwind up and down
Howling, like a slaughter'd town,
When a king in glory rides
Through the pomp of fratricides:
Those unburied bones around
There is many a mournful sound;
There is no lament for him,
Like a sunless vapour, dim,
Who once cloth'd with life and thought
What now moves nor murmurs not.

Ay, many flowering islands lie
In the waters of wide Agony:
To such a one this morn was led
My bark, by soft winds piloted:
'Mid the mountains Euganean
I stood listening to the paean
With which the legion'd rooks did hail
The sun's uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar
Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Fleck'd with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky,
So their plumes of purple grain,
Starr'd with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning's fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail,
And the vapours cloven and gleaming
Follow, down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.

Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath Day's azure eyes
Ocean's nursling, Venice lies,
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite's destin'd halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
Broad, red, radiant, half-reclin'd
On the level quivering line
Of the water crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.

Sun-girt City, thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that rais'd thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of Ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandon'd sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through a{:e}real gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourish'd worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murder'd, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chain'd like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they,
Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consum'd away—
Earth can spare ye! while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming.

Perish—let there only be
Floating o'er thy hearthless sea
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally,
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tatter'd pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan:
That a tempest-cleaving Swan
Of the sons of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcom'd him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror: what though yet
Poesy's unfailing river,
Which through Albion winds forever
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred Poet's grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled!
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay
Aught thine own, oh, rather say
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul!
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs;
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power which he
Imag'd 'mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch's urn
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp by which the heart
Sees things unearthly; so thou art,
Mighty spirit: so shall be
The City that did refuge thee.

Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that gray cloud
Many-domed Padua proud
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest-shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow
With the purple vintage strain,
Heap'd upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill
Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword
Lies unchang'd though many a lord,
Like a weed whose shade is poison,
Overgrows this region's foison,
Sheaves of whom are ripe to come
To destruction's harvest-home:
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot's rage, the slave's revenge.

Padua, thou within whose walls
Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin,
Play'd at dice for Ezzelin,
Till Death cried, 'I win, I win!'
And Sin curs'd to lose the wager,
But Death promis'd, to assuage her,
That he would petition for
Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destin'd years were o'er,
Over all between the Po
And the eastern Alpine snow,
Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smil'd so as Sin only can,
And since that time, ay, long before,
Both have rul'd from shore to shore,
That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As Repentance follows Crime,
And as changes follow Time.

In thine halls the lamp of learning,
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
It gleams betray'd and to betray:
Once remotest nations came
To adore that sacred flame,
When it lit not many a hearth
On this cold and gloomy earth:
Now new fires from antique light
Spring beneath the wide world's might;
But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by Tyranny.
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of piny dells,
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
By the fire thus lowly born:
The spark beneath his feet is dead,
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darken'd sky
With myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear: so thou,
O Tyranny, beholdest now
Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and fearest:
Grovel on the earth; ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride!

Noon descends around me now:
'Tis the noon of autumn's glow,
When a soft and purple mist
Like a vaporous amethyst,
Or an air-dissolved star
Mingling light and fragrance, far
From the curv'd horizon's bound
To the point of Heaven's profound,
Fills the overflowing sky;
And the plains that silent lie
Underneath, the leaves unsodden
Where the infant Frost has trodden
With his morning-winged feet,
Whose bright print is gleaming yet;
And the red and golden vines,
Piercing with their trellis'd lines
The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;
The dun and bladed grass no less,
Pointing from his hoary tower
In the windless air; the flower
Glimmering at my feet; the line
Of the olive-sandall'd Apennine
In the south dimly islanded;
And the Alps, whose snows are spread
High between the clouds and sun;
And of living things each one;
And my spirit which so long
Darken'd this swift stream of song,
Interpenetrated lie
By the glory of the sky:
Be it love, light, harmony,
Odour, or the soul of all
Which from Heaven like dew doth fall,
Or the mind which feeds this verse
Peopling the lone universe.

Noon descends, and after noon
Autumn's evening meets me soon,
Leading the infantine moon,
And that one star, which to her
Almost seems to minister
Half the crimson light she brings
From the sunset's radiant springs:
And the soft dreams of the morn
(Which like winged winds had borne
To that silent isle, which lies
Mid remember'd agonies,
The frail bark of this lone being)
Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,
And its ancient pilot, Pain,
Sits beside the helm again.

Other flowering isles must be
In the sea of Life and Agony:
Other spirits float and flee
O'er that gulf: even now, perhaps,
On some rock the wild wave wraps,
With folded wings they waiting sit
For my bark, to pilot it
To some calm and blooming cove,
Where for me, and those I love,
May a windless bower be built,
Far from passion, pain and guilt,
In a dell mid lawny hills,
Which the wild sea-murmur fills,
And soft sunshine, and the sound
Of old forests echoing round,
And the light and smell divine
Of all flowers that breathe and shine:
We may live so happy there,
That the Spirits of the Air,
Envying us, may even entice
To our healing paradise
The polluting multitude;
But their rage would be subdu'd
By that clime divine and calm,
And the winds whose wings rain balm
On the uplifted soul, and leaves
Under which the bright sea heaves;
While each breathless interval
In their whisperings musical
The inspired soul supplies
With its own deep melodies,
And the love which heals all strife
Circling, like the breath of life,
All things in that sweet abode
With its own mild brotherhood:
They, not it, would change; and soon
Every sprite beneath the moon
Would repent its envy vain,
And the earth grow young again.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

gnosis

Steven LaRose: Life Science

I Thought I'd go ahead and post the catalog essay I wrote on Steven's upcoming show.

Steven LaRose


Steven LaRose, Life Science, The Thorndike Gallery, Southern Oregon University, Ashland OR


As I write this short piece in early fall of 2008, civilization appears to by in a state of wild and vertiginous flux, casting off structural members, demolishing calcified institutions, and out of this frothing churn of destruction offering quietly a vacuum of possibility that the momentum of history will all too soon rush to fill with reactive events and new forms of social order. The stock markets gyrate wildly, banks fall like dominoes, gas prices oscillate, foreclosures spread like wildfire, hurricanes slam into coastlines, would be presidents are locked in a fierce and bitter contest for power. And yet…. the sun still rises and sets, birds sing in the morning light, and the toilet still flushes in the same direction. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the myriad of contradictions that are now moving into evidence before us, but we must remember that all problems have now assumed a human dimension and theoretically lie fully within our ability to manage as a collectivity. Evolution must now be imagined as a cultural and ideological process- the only dominion still left to conquer remains shrouded in the darkness of the unconscious mind, the interior of the psyche out of which all of these Furies fly.

It is clear to me that this time is unlike none other, and it is imperative that those who would create culture must somehow express the peculiarities of this emergent moment. Obviously this is no small task, particularly when one comes to recognize cultural artifacts as reactive variables in a self-transcending system, and thusly as the arbiters of our collective destiny. As but one person in a population of several billion, our individual actions are rarely ever of great importance, but it is extraordinarily urgent that we live our lives authentically and thereby act as fully individuated agents of a collective will. As we tune in to our inner voices, spirit becomes manifest in this world, falling from the void of the pleroma into matter and dimensionality. Ideas are released into the language stream, become memes and spread like mycelium into the substrate of our consciousness. As new forms of order emerge, reality is shown to be provisional and temporary, nothing more than a mask clumsily fitted upon a formless energy.

It is also at this moment that we must begin to imagine the interrelatedness of all intellectual disciplines and to resist the Balkanization of epistemology that has narrowed our worldview and limited our notion of what is possible. We must resist the reductive tendencies of modern science, and place the human animal in the macroscopic context of a large and dynamic universe-a chain of occasion which is locally manifest as our host planet and the immediate environment that we inhabit. In this ecological vision we notice that human beings have changed little genetically in the last 200,000 years. We are essentially the same hairless monkey we were back then, it just happens that we've learned a few new skills and cleverly embedded them within the invention of language. The story of History is the carrier of this epigenetic code, symbolic knowledge that has given us a vision of time and an intuition about our relationship to something greater that now lies just beyond our view. Ironically enough, in our cleverness we have also devised complex self-organizing systems that have become independent of our conscious control. One can imagine these economies and political structures as discrete entelechies, entities who's will is exerted on us, rather than by us. The largest of these Faustian demiurges, Modern Industrial Civilization, represents a new order of life that, while birthed within in the space of our learned behaviors, has broken free from the laboratory and like the Golem, or Frankenstein's monster, has begun to run amok through the village. This phylogenetic oddity, this civilization, now appears to teeter on the edge of it's own demise, and we wait nervously beneath the shadow of this great beast hatching escape plans, casting blame, circling in paralyzed confusion. Hope is in short supply.

Certainly to materialist thinkers such as the formidable evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, the future, as seen through the reductive lens of determinism and rational positivism is bleak at best. In his seminal work The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker describes industrial civilization as a Hobbesian state of social paranoia in which , "violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a pathology except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of self-interested, rational social organisms."[1] The laws of human nature are thusly largely immutable and bound within the codons of genetic material. We are but machines enacting a script that we have very little say about. Similarly, the ugly and brutish child that we have spawned will remain in a perpetual state of adolescence, enacting pathological behaviors and engaging in habitual and lethal addictions. This is a vision that leads to a future of endless war, inevitable resource depletion, and the destruction of a whole planetary ecology by the hands of a few strands of dumb but all powerful molecular code. This is the narrative of Original Sin.

Pinker's materialist vision of man as a machine seems rooted in the type of bedrock Newtonian certitude that would appear to be above critique. But life is never as simple as it seems, and there are voices emerging in the intellectual arena that propose a new science of life, one in which the previously held properties and laws of nature are not writ in adamantine, but exist within a reactive field-morphogenic, non-deterministic and ever evolving. In the body of thought known as process philosophy, life is revealed as a phenomenon of terrifying tenacity, a self-transcending system that has miraculously defied the 2nd law of thermodynamic decay for over 3.5 billion years. Most stars have shorter lives than organic life on earth. In the fluid and dynamic ontologies of Alfred North Whitehead, Rupert Sheldrake, Brian Swimme and Ilya Prigogine among others, a new cosmogonic vision of phase transition and cusp flow moves into our ken. This is a world that acknowledges the human neo-cortex as the most densely ramified structure in the universe, and in this macro-physical object, in this 4 pound gelatinous organ, the entire history of being has been pushing itself ever closer towards the present moment. Recall that the universe, in it's quest to become self aware, has developed biological structure of the eye no less than forty times in the history of organic life. Now, as this entity widens it's circle of concern, we come into focus as the central actors of a grand cosmic drama. Through the blind luck of our stochastic ramblings will we give rise to emergent properties that are expressions not of the monkey body, but of a larger will? The imperative to act as agents of this Taoistic force becomes ever more clear, for there are many possible futures, but there can only be one that actually undergoes the formality of actually occurring.

Steven LaRose

This the moment when, science, art, and life collide, and the work of Steven LaRose provides a convenient metaphor for the efforts we now must undertake. As a person, I know Steven as a beacon of curiosity, a tirelessly probing node of social and intellectual causality. Although the relative seclusion of Ashland Oregon would first appear to be a hindrance to the free transmission of thought and imagery, the blogosphere has enabled Steven and many other artists and thinkers to create immersive networks of affinity. In this virtual Petri dish, LaRose has been the agar for a transnational discourse and exchanges both droll and profound. I see Steven's identity as the curator of a virtual salon as key for understanding the aesthetics of his most recent body of work, and it pleases me that the web of connectivity itself can be thought of as a type of hyper-spatial medium in which new social properties and phenomena might emerge.

The wider we pull back, the more that the distinctions between various disciplines seem to fade away, and it is in this mode of contemplation that I begin to constellate the various qualities that fall out of this collection of paintings. Like the single celled biota that first emerged from a primordial stew, the globules and amoeboid organisms that swim through these pictures are strangely with and without intent. Like the half-realized portrait/landscapes from a previous body of work, the entities here elude classification. They are both noumena and phenomena. They are becoming and become. Through the accretion of occasion, accident and chance a gestalt emerges. Color bleeds into color, the watery soup of paint begins to suggest the presence of a maker, if not clearly something made. Chaos gives rise to order and back again. The artist is the unseen hand that orchestrates this dance, closes the membranes, adds the appropriate organelles, and steps back to watch the experiment unfold. Life emerges and then morphs into a new previously unimagined state. These works are products of William Blake's divine imagination, a creative force that acts through the artist to articulate a visionary reality birthed in the Bardo ponds of hyperdimensional existence.

In a world largely stripped of aura and presence, these paintings remind me of the value of immediate experience. They remind me of the spirit of curiosity and play that led us from the stone age huts of the Paleolithic to the Pharaonic architectural declarations of our current age. While other animals fled in fear from the fire that came after lightning strikes, we stopped to play, to examine, and to learn from this flickering magic. We became entranced with the behavior and secret properties of our surroundings, and in a protracted state of exploration, we came to understand the nature of things, the scheme of the world. The artist has been deputized to carry this spirit of exploration forward, and whether it is seen as but a modest and meager flame to bear matters not. The authentic act is of universal importance, even in the humble gesturing and sprinklings of a lone painter fumbling about in the wilderness of life. It matters very little that these painting exist, but it is extraordinarily important that they were created.

As I come to understand the new science, I come to see all of us as artists in the story of life whether we are painters or not. I am cautiously optimistic. I know that whatever our cosmic destiny, we each have access to a telos, a larger purpose that stretches outside of human time into an infinite light. We find embedded within our own tiny lives an echo of the vast and unfathomable universe beyond. As the shockwave of eschatology bursts into form as human history, like the bow waves that ride before a battleship, we know that whatever becomes of our monkey genes, we will have participated in something far grander than the banality of ordinary happenstance, that in the mantle of our humanity was held the glittering amulet of 4 billion years of intent. Just as time can be understood as the moving image of eternity, so also can we see all human action as the intimations of a transcendent other, working through sable brush, or iron hammer, or electron microscope, to cast a humble shadow into this world of dust and debris.

Jacques de Beaufort, September 18, 2008

[1] Pinker, Steven, the blank slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin Books, 2002.
______________
(links added by Steven)

Steven LaRose

William Morris

William Morris has helped me realize how the Post-Hydrocarbon Aesthetic will be articulated. Much more soon, including Richard Heinberg's Manifesto. I have seen the light.

painting by George Frederic Watts

fantasy

unconcerned with abstractions

Brittany Lane Harlan: "A Letter to My Utterly Amused"

Amused one,

I look for you through windows
In faraway paths assaulted by the wind.
I spot, a tall figure pacing toward me
With familiar hesitance, like
Sacred breath shared in closets
During wartime.
Don't you know I've felt with you
Like children hiding from some fear?
Just yesterday we were reaching out
Of windows as being, for us, could
Never be contained by walls,
And tomorrow, may never hither to.
But listen, in this maniacal embrace
I am weeping with desire.

What is to become of our cherished
Existence that has behaved like
Water on glass?
Tis' but a romance everlasting?
I begin to feel as if it is a romance
Of its own right,
As if we have written a novel
With our hands loyally anchored.
I lay still and time possesses
My surroundings in ribald cups
Of coffee,and in little molds of my
Feet resting in piles of boots, and
In the tresses of my hair reaching
To my hips like a distant hint
From your hands...
The clouds are filling with
Frigid wishes.
Soon, another winter will
Bury our prayers and I shall
Lay here, still, possessed.

I think of you in a carmine coat,
Undressing.
I think of you out of a carmine coat,
Of all that remains.
You, who roams with a joy only
The modern world could encumber-
You, who comes and comes again
With tireless entrance- You,
Who finds a foreign father in my skin.
O' Fickle brother, literary lover, I have
A soft, dark place for you to rest in.
You, you, amused.

Let the prudence of condemned
Lips unfold without delay.
Let the ideas of solitary nights
Become something finite and forgiven!

Amused one,

If you will recall;

I know you then,
I know you now,
I will know you all my life.

reprinted with permission from brilliant poet Brittany Lane Harlan

every form of witchcraft is what you will rebuke