Revolution, Force, Building a New Order (or workable chaos)

I accept the necessity of strategic force in opposing oppresion, but a new order cannot be built or imposed by force. This is an enormous problem and contradiction inherent in any revolution, and one we will have to face, honestly, realistically, creatively.

From Protest though Resistance to Transformation

Let protests and steet marches and celebations be the visible face of a deeper and more lasting resistance, and resistance be the intersection of transformation, and let that transformation be so deeply rooted in our animal being, in the crops we plant to sustain us, in our enbodied communal imagination that no one will ever dare again to exploit and use and kill our fellow humans or animal brothers for their profit, or trample on those they believe to be weak or strange or unworthy, for until we come together in love and mutual aid, we are all weak, and strangness is our beauty and our glory, and until lives grow out of the compost of creative life in everyone, we are unworthy to walk on the good earth that sustains us.

Understanding One's Symptoms

Understanding one’s symptoms. Long sleep last night. Almost 12 hours. Down at 10:30, up at 10:00. Stirred to waking, as usual, by low level anxiety.

No bed time wine last night. I’ve been self-medicating for chronic, low level physical anxiety. Break the habit. Two days. My head feels more clear, anxiety still there.

Describe: heart rate slightly higher than normal at rest. emotionally on edge. General feeling of dis-ease with myself, my being-in-the-world

Effects: Makes every ‘task’ –everything that feels like a ‘task,’ more difficult to initiate. I haven’t even been able to spend time reading for months.

If it weren’t for making art I don’t think I’d survive. This is not hyperbole.

Even those tasks (not directly making new work: improving drawling skills, working on anatomy, figure drawing), while they give pleasure when I do them are difficult to initiate. Felt resistance. Like having to push open—or through—an impossibly heavy door (… better a metaphorical door than a wall).

Procrastination becomes a symptom. On-line chess. The intersection of the physical neural/chemical conditions, and situational conditions.

Resistance. To being pushed into pre-existing choices—of any kind, whether concocted by others or outside circumstances, or by myself (making plans, schedules). The line between here, always fuzzy. Thus, the relief of art—and gardening. Purely spontaneous action. What I aspire to—my jouissance ?) to do nothing else? Make art. Tend my garden.

Conclusion. Incurable condition. Find the least destructive way to alleviate the aggravating symptoms. Less wine for starters. More art. But then… what do I do with what I’ve made? Find places to exhibit? Do the promotion required to sell? Why do I have to think about that? More anxiety—more stuff I ‘have to” do.

Incurable.

The Great Disaster

The Great Disaster we're all a part of isn't the one in the headlines. It's not a sudden catastrophe. A day of horror. An explosion on a street. Planes hurtling into high rises. It's long and drawn out, incident after incident, law after law, arrest after arrest, murder after murder--none of which are the Great Disaster, but each are a part of it. More like a movement of techtonic plates--every tremor, every seismic event, is but the visible part of an imperceptable change of the landscape, of the shape of a continent. More like the melting of the Greenland icepack... we see the calving of the icebergs, as spectacular as the are, but not the rising of the oceans--which doesn't happen in an hour or a day. I'm speaking of the end of this civilzation... of all that's been built on and dependent on the delusional autopoietic machinery of capitalistism and nation states that it created to serve it. We can feel it cumulatively... feel that everything is changing, the world as we have believed it be is already no more, but then... it looks not that much different than yesterday, or the day before, and we go about our lives, oblivious of the escalator of extinction we're all riding together. lnevitable as growing old... noticable only when we look back a decade, or two or three, and see the marks of death written across our every feature.

#161 New Mexico (3)

9x31 New Mexico. Acrylic on composition board. $400

#160 Rio Grande Rift (2)

10x34 Acrylic, New Mexico sand on composition board $400

#159 Rio Grande rift, New Mexico

11x35 New Mexico dirt, acrylic on composition board. $400