Wednesday, May 17, 2017

own - an essay / want - the sonnet


Early on, i accepted as fact that if i had any hope for a creative life, i’d either have to take orders about what i create, or buy back my life. The dissonance of having to buy freedom came as a shock, for i was born into a patriotic household which held the american dream in high esteem. The corporate overthrow of my nation was still in the shadows and living under rocks with grubs and bacteria. Initially, i believed in the sanctity of art and the honesty of literature - that the world of ideas was a temple within which the best of humanity was forged. My formative years coincided with the period of abundance just after WWII when the corporate tax rate was 90%, the nation`s interstate highways were built and the educational system was the envy of the world. However like some bad movie arc, my efforts to market my creative product coincided with the bumper sticker that read “he who dies with the most toys wins;” whoever printed that 1st batch is probably still living off the proceeds, or bankrupted by greed - and we all know what bankruptcy can accomplish if you turn to politics. Undeterred, i continued with my objective to carve stone until i was very old, because it gave me pleasure. It was not a straight line, as i was young and my ambition a very complex equation - at the time, i had no idea how complex. I sought the aid of an expert by returning to school. I had met my first stone carving instructor during a vision quest in New York City - it was s magical time when all things were possible. He was old school, 90 years of old school. Of the many things he taught me, carving without power tools was the most practical for reasons too vast to enumerate here. This wisdom, however, ran full up against the expert’s advice - command would be more accurate.

The expert was a fine man, but his strength was as a mason, whereas my first instructor was an artist. Nor do i regret my time working with power tools or peering into the workings of the art market from the inside out - it is ego filled. I had always been aware of that unsavory aspect of the process, but dismissed the manifestations as a crutch of the dilettante. Returning to school was rationalized surrender and the first step in my downfall, for now rather than owning the good fortune which comes from finding an activity you really love, i was willing to trade sacraments (machine - profit vs hand - poverty) in order to crash the financial barrier - a Faustian bargain one might argue, and like all good bargains, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t - no amount of machine proficiency could mask my growing disdain for the trappings of art world success. It wasn’t long after this, i was strongly encouraged to find a trade more profitable - i’d be crazy not to. As a young buck, hormones drive the train and i was not then, probably not now, grounded enough to fully appreciate how hardwired the ability to provide is to that of the biological drive. Carving weekends worked for a while, but eventually the payments for a new van, food for the dogs, clothes for the child and entertainment for the wife required a 2nd and at times 3rd job. The silver lining for this cloud was the discipline of language; i’d always deferred where my father’s stock and trade was concerned, no doubt some oedipal tension there, but who’d have thought expressing oneself could be such fun¿

Upon graduation i fled aerospace where i’d been renting my grey matter to the weapons industry into teaching at a time when “no child left behind” was becoming the corporate trojan horse to our nation’s most sacred asset - the young mind. You might well imagine how suited i was to this environment - too much of a free thinker to assimilate into the Bohemian Rhapsody of fine art; too moral to design weapons of destruction; how was i ever going to grade one student against another¿ By this juncture all my failure as a successful human being manifested in box after box of mementos of former glory - scads of aerospace coffee cups emblazoned at the taxpayer expense, nameplates from prestigious assignments, pictures with notable people (nobody you’d know) and always the infernal toolbox full of carving tools. Now that i’d been summarily dismissed from every rationalized occupation i could, there was nothing left but surrender - commercial real estate. It hadn’t occurred to me that i could sink any lower, but like Bob Dylan said, “when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.” A 50 year old l’enfant terrible in a room full of trust-fund babies; a pre 9/11 cia operative looking for a better life; and a roster of egos that make the U.S. Chief Executive, what’s his name, look like Dr. Albert Schweitzer - what could go wrong¿ My last wife a sainted woman, had by this time reconciled me to the fact that if there are Sunday Painters, there damn sure could be sunday sculptors; she got her credit cards and i got religion.

Until the food i’d been using to repress the nagging suspicion of trouble-in-paradise ruptured my appendix just as wife #3 skipped out with her debts paid and her name conveniently on the deed after having recently refinanced Chez Joseph. Self respect is highly overrated, until you go from wife, home and a job to a vacuum. The meaning of everything becomes highlighted, much like the vividness of a flower petal after a near death experience. Nor does meaning from such events necessarily make more sense, however brilliant it may be. For example, even with all the insights from such an assault on one’s measured perspective - maturation i think they call it - i am continuing to pay storage on things. Along with the one or two tchotkes that survived a bitter searching of the heart are all the stone carvings - residue from days of faith and hope - 17, a prime number which about sums up the significance of a life’s work. The far more valuable thing locked away in storage, something which can never be taken from me is the certain knowledge of how little power we have over things. Our conceit that one item is anymore valuable than another comes from a hierarchy of value we barely even think about anymore. It is assumed that the things we love will benefit from our interest and the things we hate will be punished - this delusion of power robs us from the awareness of our insignificance within the universe . . .

. . . simultaneously blocking our vision of the awe in which we swim. Robin Williams, may you . r . i . p , described life as fleeting; i miss his gift for understatement. We as a population have never been as enslaved as we are today, not in the perverse history of our kind with all of its cruelty, nobility and contradiction have we been as subjugated as today. The equivalent would be the ancient gazelle hunt in the canyon using cunning and intellect to stampede the unwitting herd only to find instead of nimble gazelles running for your spear tips, are pissed off Water Bufallo who hijacked the thoroughfare of your canyon ambush because they know where the water is - through you. Chevrolet even named a car the Impala, and if you don’t think they were seducing your sense of adventure with that name, you never owned an Impala. The sad truth is modern transportation was best described in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” which for the life of me i cannot understand how that cartoon ever saw the light of day given Disney’s corporate ethos in these the latter days of our species. Objects are certainly capable of reflecting back to the viewer information, even emanating information to those tuned to that very low frequency, but as sentient creatures graced with feeling we have somehow come to forget that an inanimate object is unable to manifest the simple gurgle of any infant creature - panda, eagle, crocodile, or even human. We have become so numb to the magnificence of existence that in our hunger we seek it everywhere - the chain of consumption; the ceaseless din of media; the irrational wish to be understood by a computer without feelings; or blindness to that miserable hate you find in others, as your own.




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want - the sonnet

At six i’d like to've sung country music.
i’d seen a girl smiling at a singer.
Then a stingray bike i’d have liked to pick,
because the seat somehow fit you and her.

Once in a while, she was all i wanted,
seldom worked if she weren’t looking at you,
which can be enough, you wished you was dead.
thank g_d for woman - the better world’s hue.

Woman taught me well that i should not sing
for her but for my own understanding.
She let me to carry her books one spring,
“saying what love! but knowledge is more binding”

i know very little about women.
i do my best, as it is with most men.


jts 051717
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 








Monday, May 15, 2017

an essay / a sonnet


The word essay in French means “tried”, and so like its originator Michel de Montaigne - i do, i did and i will continue, because the alternative is surrender which i am also trying to accomplish. Fucking paradoxes - are they our friends¿ The capitalists resolved this paradox by trademarking “just do it” - a convenient slight of hand designed to weaken consumer restraint and encourage the delusion that if you pay outrageous sums for the white man’s moccasin assembled on the backs of wage slaves earning less in a day than what you spend on coffee before lunch. The workers suffer far from the bucolic venues you train your delusion of accomplishment, or more accurately feed your dopamine addiction. Don’t misunderstand, i loved running, but regardless of my affection for that exercise or addiction to dopamine, the realities of decay, unequal leg length and surgical intrusion have cornered my aged constitution into a reality learning curve; i’ve resorted to “adapt and improvise” under the guise of surrender. Nor was the discipline necessary to run 20 miles a week entirely in vain, now i write, sweating and whining the entire distance until I lay my head down at night and sleep the sleep of exhaustion. Running and essays have much in common; both have a beginning and end; each provides nourishment to the spirit; and during each activity one can begin to see things unrecognized prior to the effort - limits, broken-limits, understanding, and/or ignorance (most especially one’s own).

I chose not to title this essay, because i’m disillusioned regarding persuasion and its usefulness in improving the world (read saving humanity from certain doom). I read this morning that coral reefs provide half the oxygen in the atmosphere of our planet, and that the coral reefs on our planet are expected to expire by 2050 due to the increasing warmth of oceans - the “Great Barrier Reef” the largest living thing on earth and nursery to one quarter of the planet’s marine life is dying, if not dead already. With or without a title, how do you share information like that and not want to be persuasive¿ I am deep in the process of resolving issues of my own mortality, which for a stonecutter can be quite complicated, for example a brother (who is now facing cancer) asked me once if i carved stone in an effort to become immortal - like the rung bell, that question has never ceased to resonate. My resolution is that if i’m not immortal now what future time could possible contain more than all that i am right here, right now. It may not be a perfect solution, but how did we come by the deluded fantasy of any manner of perfection¿ Could it be the shrill drumbeat of deficiency blaring from every media portal and attached to every screen we consider on this “information superhighway” that demands we consider our existence as incomplete until we .  .  . buy, read, click, go - do  .  etc . etc . etc

Last night while sharpening a knife i noticed where a previous sharpener had created a dip at the junction of the outward curve and the inward curve. I understand this from fashioning stone and the complexities of joining convex and concave surfaces which can easily result in an unwanted line. From school i remembered a hated, but highly respected professor extolling the virtues of the “S curve” as it pertained to art and it occurred to me how many other places depend on this conscious balance of natural beauty which can be butchered by the inattentive hand of man, so i posted in the badlands of fb “isolation and distribution want equilibrium for perceptronium” with an s-curve street sign and an article from Wikipedia describing the s-curve. None of this explained my point that in today’s world the outward curve of “isolation” has nearly become a complete circle - money, lifestyle, information, love - so many things, while the inner curve of “distribution” has become a nearly flat line with very little of what is needed getting to so many who have such great need. I have grave reservations about the wizards of technology and their commitment to a level playing field, but must accept that my shorthand symbology is lost to most with or without zucky’s help picking what my friends see, or googol goosing the blogger numbers and obscuring from me information about who looks at what, simultaneously feeding the surveillance industry custom forms itemizing when i shit and how much.

This is where it gets dicey, do i now accept that what i think about the correlation between a thoughtfully sharpened knife edge and our impending extinction is just too bizarre for public consumption, even if in my heart of hearts i believe it to be marginally useful, if for no other reason than one lonely lost soul who might feel cared for by a perfect stranger¿ What if i’m providing public service entertainment for those hoards of snoops now employed to watch over a dangerous population waking to the destruction of their world; and what if the logic of what i say disguised as self-centered blather from a disaffected expatriate encourages one member from the conformity cocoon to flap his/her existential wings only to find the sky is the only thing to which they are chained - (thank you sheriff Dillon). The sad fact remains, persuasion is a weak tool for the weak minded, and the only real use this writing effort is good for is to reflect to myself the deficiencies of my reasoning and perhaps nurture the personal delusion of contribution to the greater good at a point in our history where “greater” is about to become exceptionally reduced. All the channels we now enjoy for entertainment and communication are about to be choked off through deliberate malfeasance, coordinated sabotage, and greed. What will be left is the giant screen from Orwell’s “1984” repeating over and over again - “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”


So while i continue to adjust to an existential transition into the unknown, i will continue to share my efforts to understand what can’t be understood, because it is there that the soul of our growth resides. If we are to survive as something more than drones for the ruling class and fodder for their consumer massacre, it will be from individuals choosing difficult discussions about painful subjects with others who don’t want to hear - fucking paradox; is it an irony that paradox is my only friend¿ - “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” - Sun Tzu; “only your friends can hurt you, your enemies can’t get that close” - A. Nonymous. It doesn’t matter much, it’s certainly not worth going to war over. I have satisfied myself in this struggle with a problem that has no answer - how to save humanity from itself. Am i a better person for it¿ I’m a far better person than if i had spent the same amount of time scrolling fb making zucky richer; i’m a little closer to death and feel better about it; nor is it outside the realm of possibility that the one person reading this expository nightmare might look up perceptronium; be struck dumb by the logic contained in that word and then devote the balance of his/her life isolating its meaning and distributing her/his findings over an alternet designed by loving hearts to propagate meaning into a meaningless world.


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a sonnet

Iambic pentameter is our friend
and if it is good enough for Shakespeare
any friend of his, is mine to the end,
an end i’d have later than earlier.

Not so much because this place is so great,
but because frying pan into the fire’s true;
though change is how the bard would exclamate, 
that and doses of existential pooh. 

Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes
besides that, why change horses in midstream?
where is it written that prior forms will maim,
or good taste is what consensus will deem¿

if i’m having fun minding my own business
what’s your concern if i mock you or ISIS. 

jts  051517

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved · 










Saturday, May 13, 2017

give / take - the sonnet


Can i write while listening to music - do i need your permission¿ Is expressing oneself with the written word while listening to a rhythm any different than feeling one’s heart or hearing a car horn while talking¿ Is it the equivalent of a guru introducing an obnoxious character into an ashram simply to provoke greater focus for the aspirants. Can it be the same for the act of giving¿ I’d read once that you give the gift you’d want yourself; i’d also read the best gift one can make is of one’s time. This makes sense, for from what little i possess, time is what i give away most reluctantly. This creates conflict for me in any number of ways - higher wisdom dictates service to others as a common sense solution to much of what ails our world. What is it to be of service - like the gift one desires, do i leave others alone¿ When i see misery, i strongly want to relieve that suffering. Are compassion and time intertwined¿ It seems to be that way on the faces of aged i’ve had the pleasure to spend time with. However, none of these abstruse considerations include the material props modern media cajoles its thralls, either to own, or give away in testimony to one’s prosperity. I am an unrepentant anti-consumer renegade. My resistance is not for lack of appreciation of fine cloth, food or music; but in repulsion from the transparent greed of those flogging pale imitations of fineness; while reducing the noble independent human spirit to that of a grasping, selfish angry wraith.

My parents were both teachers - one of English the other of Art. This happenstance of birth is a gift i’ve spent much of my life trying to share. However to date the closest i’ve gotten to my ambition is a more profound appreciation for the abundance of lessons involved in such a pursuit. You cannot share that which another has no interest, anymore than something can be taken from you for which you have no interest. So how to be generous in a world supremely occupied with the business of acquisition and ceaseless trumpeting of hard bought booty¿ Lao Tzu - “Simplicity, patience, compassion - these are your greatest treasures.”  Of all that i’ve ever come into possession, these three qualities of mind have been the most difficult to gain, yet the most easily given away - if for no other reason than the pleasure they seem to bring as gifts - a fucking paradox - ain’t life grand. The cultivation of these 3 treasures has brought me closer to my original ambition for the sharing of my creative heritage, albeit without much resemblance to the initial concept. Like the gift to oneself, i’ve found it is enough that i practice my passion without attachment to the results.

Early dreams of conquest and acclaim have given way to an intractable pull toward some unknown outcome. Although the future for me has been reduced to a hazy outline, this writing effort for a more personal understanding of what it is to give stands in high relief. Why is that¿ I have learned very few people are interested in what you might think they need, but may find common ground when they hear you share something you are searching for. I am searching for how to give, and it is confusing. I recently saw an interview with an Australian Bushman who explained there are no words for “please” and “thank you” in his native tongue because sharing is an accepted feature of his culture, however he was referring to material objects. What of our digital isolation and the illusion of being connected without presence¿ What i am giving is contained in my mind’s eye of you scratching your head asking yourself WTF¿ That barely seems substantial - like a monologue in an empty room, yet there must be a reason you’ve taken your time to read this far¿ Based on life experience, i’m fairly certain that i’m not the only human being on a planet of 7 billion searching for ways to give, so we have common ground.

In Bali the method of instruction for the very young is to take the child’s hand and go through the motion; by self disclosure of my own difficulties it may be possible that someone reading will be encouraged to puzzle through to an unknown solution using language. If however, the reader is sampling another’s work for reasons of self aggrandizement as i myself have done, you may be reading facile pychobabble devoid of sense. Nor is a leap into writing for one’s pleasure necessarily an honest one. It may be that my repressed selfishness toward others drives this sanctimonious declaration of innocence and vacuous mea culpa¿ i don’t know .  .  . I know i’m not alone, nor are you. It was the prospect of losing fun in the creative process where i’ve found sanctuary. For example, just now googoling “art and literature” to further expand an emerging idea, when what rose to the top of the heap was a Wikipedia article on the Economics of Art and Literature : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_the_arts_and_literature. This is how the internet has become an instrument of indoctrination for the purpose of defining value. By any measure of market value, i’m a dismal failure. For the longest time, i was inoculated from this harsh truth by conceit until i realized - my work is just that, mine.

Minus the confusion of competition upon which art industrialization has piked the collective creative genius of hu[wo]manity, i still very much want to share what i’ve created, because i like it. However, if as an artist you are not giving yourself the gift you’d want most yourself - the thrill of carving into one’s greatest fears; exalting the most delusional fantasies, or plumbing the depths of one’s most most debased infirmities; instead kowtowing to acclaim or financial incentive - who’d fucking want to do that¿ Is it an irony that each of the categories for personal exploration above has a correspondent new release, be that xbox, ipad, cnn, darkweb or senate hearing¿ Or have i placed myself in a “painter’s corner of logic by having chased a dialectic for giving without a safety net. Do i give fuck¿ As it happens, i do. But the fear i’ve carved out here is my own and not designed to inflame yours; any exaltation from this effort is mine alone knowing i did my best and it’s possible, even likely, one other person will have read it, which may be delusional; and without completely gutting myself for public spectacle, i’ve made an honest effort to be vulnerable which unfortunately i still consider an infirmity. The joy however remains from taking my most precious resource time and attempting to construct something out of nothing - the gift of meaning, or lack thereof.
  
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take - the sonnet

A young man i know kept my unbrella
i lent him to keep rain from his mother.
At first mad, like he saw my weak aura,
later saddened by his offense to her.

I write to learn more about this event
but find only a cave roaring inside
“not here, go back to your own fucking tent.”
?you took my shelter and left me outside¿

Nonsense - the sky’s immense - we are all wet,
and getting wetter; if our water’s owned
it means, when we are born we assume debt.
same as thinking kindness can be loaned.

tomorrow i draw; like this time i take
to search for some meaning in what i make 

jts 051317
http://stoneartist.com 
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

Monday, May 8, 2017

connection / connect - the sonnet


Ray Kurzweil - “director of engineering” at googol predicts singularity by 2045: “Singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.” - Wikipedia. My mind balks at the stupidity of such an assertion. We humans have taken the paradise of a self-correcting ecosphere and plundered it to the extent there is serious doubt it will support life as we know it within the next hundred years. With few exceptions all of the promises made about industrialization by the ruling class have proven to be lies; how is it now that this latest promise of human salvation is anymore valid than those campaign promises of amerika’s current chief executive Mr. M.T. Suit himself¿ In our world today there are 8 men - 62 depending on the http:// pointer - who own as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion human beings, 2.7 billion of which live on less than $2 a day. Why are these arrogant pencil-neck-geeks not solving this obviously more pressing issue of human existence. Is it that they believe based on happenstance, wherewithal and mathematical capacity that the chimera of their left-brain perception has deluded them into believing themselves, like Icarus, in command of wings; or is it more akin to C.G. Jung´s shadow principle and their infinite hubris is just casting the shadow of Einstein’s observation about infinite human stupidity¿

My sense is this intellectual flailing resembles more the behavior of a flapping crane firmly gripped by the alligator - humanity being the hapless crane and the inexorable physics of ecological degradation being the alligator. These digital wizards who stumbled onto the means to lift the veil of misunderstanding brought about by the historical lack of communication between distant cultures rather than augment, maximize and open all channels between people have been guided by what Leonard Cohen described as the “venal chart.” This business model is so transparent my gifted nephew while still in high school was salivating with visions of sugar plum fairies in his eyes as he described the theory of “monetizing” keystrokes. My limited training with computers includes the acronym Garbage In; Garbage Out (GIGO) a euphemism which seems to have disappeared from the public lexicon in the superheated virtual economy, a marketplace which oddly resembles the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” even more than ‘ole M.T. Suit himself. A great sadness for me within this sad existence is the near certain conviction that amongst those 2.7 billion human beings living on $2 a day there is a collective brilliance which far outstrips any avatar the digital wizards of oz could ever conjure given unlimited funds; unlimited time; and unlimited computing power.

The infinite growth paradigm upon which the ruling class bases its wanton destruction of our planetary commons is a hoax reflecting the same juvenile penis envy manifested in Moore’s (Postulate) Law about computing power doubling (on average) every two years. What good is such hubris without a purpose¿ To date the only tangible evidence is the ability of a smaller and smaller segment of the population to fleece greater wealth from more people simultaneously convincing said people they are getting a good deal. This deception is not the fault of those unfortunate few born into favored positions, for they do not possess the internal moral compass born of struggle, compassion and foresight necessary to seek a greater good. The fault lies with those who know better - those who have been betrayed for gain or claim misery to be the responsibility of others. Humans have been at this living shit for a long time and our history is rich with examples of right and wrong - if we allow a handful of empty souls to determine the fate of our future it is because we are not listening to each other - sharing what we’ve learned in our short 200,000 years on this planet. Instead reaching out and learning from people and cultures that was nearly impossible when I was young, we are paying corporations to determine what we see, who we communicate with, all the while paying cash to these same corporate ciphers to steal our expression and market our uniqueness as though it had been manufactured on corporate servers - that don’t seem right.

From the few entitled persons I’ve met in my wanderings, the one trait the privileged seem to share is a paradox between exaggerated self-worth and a dearth of self-awareness. Generalities are of little use, except to say anyone who accumulates more than they can realistically spend usually justify that excess with the belief it is deserved rather than just dumb luck, or in the case of up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger success stories, the bitterness and armor necessary for such singleness of purpose seems to mute the internal voice which usefully asks ‘what is enough’¿ What is of concern to me - is the character of those claiming rights which they are apparently reluctant to bestow on others, most especially the wealth of knowledge we are contributing to, but not benefitting from. When I am in a public place, I tend to the extremes of morbid curiosity about everything and delusional invisibility, neither of which has any real analog on the internet. As to the former, it would take weeks of visiting websites to gain even a remote sense found in a stroll through an airline terminal, or busy urban promenade, and as to the latter, regardless of every profiler media drama ever concocted, or reams of data overseers may choose to collect about me; to believe that contrived avatar resembles my ragged wounded existential self any more than the barest outlines I myself am beginning to perceive after some 3 score years on the planet speaks more to the conceit of technology than any desultory laziness toward my own self-awareness.

My father held C.G. Jung’s concept of synchronicity in high regard, so it is not a complete surprise that when I went to research the precise definition of “desultory”, I learned the internet is down where I live. While the meaning of connection has morphed a great deal in recent years, the essence remains constant; it is mostly now a question of connected to what¿ Should the internet become unavailable forever, will the questions I’ve tried to consider in this essay become any less valid¿ My audience is already suspect with blogger registering an average of 175 to 275 hits day in day out - a complete fiction as far as I’m concerned. I figure the lords of googol are goosing the numbers, just like they fudge their taxes and as anyone who has ever attempted to communicate with the exalted purveyor of all that’s known in the universe, it is a closed circuit - just like trying to get someone on the phone at fb, or reaching one’s bank without a password or a phone. Right now the leaders concept of connection feels a lot like Bob Dylan’s “the cops don’t need you, and man they expect the same.” It’s no small wonder that when the kind woman said to me “I think you’re searching for a deep connection” I felt like weeping. The irony is of course death, the wall of understanding with which our world has fortified itself is the same paper tiger the ruling class is counting on to testify for them once “consciousness” has been uploaded onto the corporate servers after the lesser humans have succumbed to yet again, another empty promise; I’ll still be laughing though somewhere in the aether knowing in my heart GIGO. 
  
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connect - the sonnet

It is a modern conceit to believe
addiction comes from not being connected,
as though anyone could ever even leave.
ask anyone still talking to the dead.

Yet birth makes no promise you will find love;
ask the wandering child from Syria,
or prairie dog shot by the haters glove-
hand covered fearing hypothermia.

What does it mean if one seeks to connect?
-that someplace inside can’t see what’s outside¿
If there’s in and outside - which to protect?
how does one ever know who’s on whose side¿

What if it doesn’t matter? We’re all one-
knowing oneself is to know everyone¿

jts 050817
http://stoneartist.com












Tuesday, April 25, 2017

black and white / full spectrum - the sonnet


I did not publish my last essay “easy,” or its sonnet “hard,” because my macbook crashed to the floor in the dead of night, never to boot to the light of day again. I’d owned the beast for 7 years across 4 continents which only describes the amount of love, misery, fury and joy it carried with it into the aether. Hopefully we are too early in the Artificial Intelligence design cycle for my computer companion to have been too contaminated, with the only waveforms emanating from it’s off-or-on blackhole status reflecting my humanity more than the twisted code of today´s masters of the universe. may they . r . i . p .

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I’ve had much time to think about this essay, for I was already gun shy and self-conscious about expressing the written word prior to my computer’s demise, nor was it just the written word for which my creative being seems to have been stymied. I´d like to draw up a list of all the whys and wherefores, but they’d all be exterior - ghosts of resentment, fear, lack of _____ (fill in the blank). The longer i waited, the larger and more fearsome the demons grew - sort of; otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this. Eventually the utility of seeing my own thinking in such a way as to expose my flaws to myself became too tempting. I’d rather laugh at you, but that would be cruel and likely not as funny. I’m beginning to suspect the root of my creative ebb has been from taking it “all” too seriously, as though somehow my tired old mac crashed to the floor for some more sinister reason than my own lack of mindfullness. But this is where it gets really dicey, even if there was a demonic purpose in the cosmos responsible for ending the life of my innocent if somewhat trusted ally - so fucking what. If we are in the midst of a holy epoch, like extinction by our own hands, or the just result of damnation by a divine entity so stupid it would condemn us for the blasphemers in our midst - that sort of monumental conceit is laughable.

Computers in fact are little more than a gazillion off and on switches trained to hum on command, sort of like the current ruling class appointee - all together now, “of thee i sing.” Nor am i immune to the siren of media; having weened myself from the phone, for about a split second after the red circle with a slash through it on my screen condemned me to what the technician would later confirm, i considered life offline. Talk about your two-edged sword, we as a species are crashing into the point-of-no-return like it was the Superbowl with our team behind by 3 and 30 seconds on the clock, but all i could come up with in my existential moment was “how’m i gonna write without text edit”¿ Yes, it was worth it to stay online, even though i am in pain here and now sifting through my ignorance for some thread of logic that would encourage an unknown stranger, or cadre of strangers to train the digital lens back up our economic food chain; identify the villains responsible for war and sentence them like Prometheus to have their livers consumed into eternity: sidebar - so you can get a feel for how far off course we are, Prometheus - a Titan, was condemned because he tricked Zeus into portioning the gizzards of livestock to the gods and leaving the meat to nourish humanity - not one of the schmos riding in limousines calling themselves Titans today gives a rat`s ass if you live or die, much less if your food is nutritious. 

Leonard Cohen described writing as what’s left after you delete the slogans, but in the same interview he also, g_d rest his soul, talked about the tyranny of posture by saying there’s a good thing to say about everything, if you’re on the right side.” It is a conundrum to me that those wreaking the most havoc are in the greatest need of kindness. War will not rescue us from ourselves - that is fact; the same sort of fact that you will die alone, even if you are surrounded by 7 billion other human beings dying that same instant. So what of kindness, how is it the wisest of our kind for as long as we have recorded our experience have said virtually the same thing Mr. Cohen framed so eloquently - “love is the only engine of survival”¿ How have we allowed ourselves to be so easily bamboozled into this corner of terror in a world full of magnificent grandeur¿ What have we accomplished by quarreling over scraps believing anyone can be improved by what they own¿ I don’t know; i wished i did, but like wife # one was fond of saying, “wish in one hand, shit in the other; see which get’s fuller faster.” I learned a lot from her - mostly the difference between enough and too much, that and kindness is always possible even if you have to walk away to make it happen.

Some things one cannot walk away from, one’s self, for example. Take the arrogant fools building computer profiles of person`s of interest, which in today’s political climate is everybody and nobody. The persons, LLCs or as i like to think of them, faceless cowards pulling on the levers of power determine who is scrutinized and to what degree. But what can they ever learn, and this is very important, to what end¿ I write with great difficulty hoping my ignorance will bubble to the surface while i attempt to have fun with words. For me, learning who the fuck i am seems to be the only practical endeavor, for if i’m unable to recognize myself how would i ever be able to see another clearly? Social media provides the collusion delusion of complicity against power by encouraging the assumption that, 1) what you post is recognizable, 2) what someone else posts resembles anything. Near as i can tell, it’s all emotional pornography. One of my defects is caring what someone else thinks, so now that our keystrokes have been monetized for the benefit of the ruling class, it is logical to believe what one types has value to somebody. As a writer this becomes a thorny issue for me. If the world of ideas is my sanctuary, how do i distinguish a thought of my own from a prompt; or whether that prompt is arising from a sincere effort to help me on my bumbling human way, or an intrusion from some psy-ops handler from a “contagion” experiment gone horribly wrong¿

Then again as Larry the door maker might say, t’was ever thus. It’s frustrating to think how little we’ve changed, yet how easily we are being changed. I made a promise to my father to never stop writing; he was a loving man - shortcomings and all. I’ll not lie and say that is why you are reading this, rather i’d share his sense of fun, which at it’s core is the most worthwhile aspect of the creative life. My good fortune has been in defining my own fun - like plumbing the depths of one’s own misery in public with little hope of finding anymore common ground than one might find parking cars. There is pain, the pain i create for myself and the pain depicted in our media for the sole purpose of inflaming passions. I can do nothing about the latter, but denounce it for its cowardice and its incompetence. That doesn’t make my self-inflicted suffering vanish, but it does help with the delusion that one can do nothing to help. Suffering is an oddly binary experience, or as Bill the house builder was fond of commenting “you want that pain to go away, slam your hand in a door and you’ll forget all about it.” There’s a sad element of truth to that joke - it is the temptation to confront greater pain that makes you laugh through your tears, but more importantly the inescapable fact there is always a choice. Not the lesser of two-evils fallacy used to bouy the latest ruling class democratic charade, but the kind of choice one makes to see light in heart of darkness.


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full spectrum - the sonnet

“The electro magnetic spectrum is the irreducible constituent of all physical reality.” - Albert Einstein

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i memorized this as a man-child;
googol says it is not a real quote.
could be - hippy days were pretty wild -
lots of nonsense, like looking for a groat.

people in different places and times
see different things - each no less true.
some threads will run all the way through - like rhymes
uh-huh / uh-uh may’ve saved a caveman crew¿

from what, i can’t say - you know i don’t lie;
wouldn’t if i could - best left to experts.
you know the ones - “i know holy - here’s why,”
though their truths often come mostly in spurts.

now’s a good time to pull out all the stops
end greed, hate, delusion - ruling class props

jts 042517
http://stoneartist.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 


Friday, March 17, 2017

my friend Gary Cox


I had had an exceptionally good day drawing after a too long period of transition between studios, and g_d in her infinite wisdom chose this time for me to open a rare email from Gary’s sister: “Gary has diet.” I’m living in a foreign nation in new lodgings; it took a moment for me to register the full weight of this transcendental-typo. It was one of those sea changes that no matter how prepared one might be for the full impact, it remains unfathomable until much later. Gary had adopted me as a younger member of his family at a time when mine own was fighting against all odds for its survival while up to its ass in unidentified hostiles - like many of us in those days. Gary and his family helped me to graduate high school by allowing to couch surf in the apartment which he, and on occasion his younger sister, shared with their mother. This was an act of uncommon kindness during the aftermath of the 60’s cultural meltdown. Gary had already been to, and gone from the larger world having been a roommate with my oldest brother in the revolutionary heydays days of San Francisco - long before Google closed escrow on the last open hearts. Prior to this, Gary’s entrepreneurial spirit had ridden the crest of demand for handmade leather bags all the rage before the “vegans” excommunicated such bestiality from the quiet streets of 1960’s Hipster-Doofusville, turned Post-Modern Weimar Republic. Gary had the unique capacity for finding residence and then thriving in the “belly of the beast”, any beast. I attended my last semester of high school, working the swing shift in an aircraft antenna factory, while Gary spent his days painting fine art; I did not know at the time how much that experience was to influence my future.

The home where I grew up was creative, my mother - an art teacher, and myself having taken up sculpture while attending my last semester of high school in England. It was not unusual to see someone absorbed by painting; what was exceptional, was Gary’s ability to market his work to a broad spectrum of clientele, including the parlaying of paintings into flying lessons from an instructor in the apartment complex. Gary’s focus was well demonstrated in his zeal for chess; The apartment complex was on the takeoff runway for John Wayne Airport, so bantering which accompanied Gary’s very competitive character would cease while a jet would begin it’s ascent - there was a full minute lapse on either side of the aircraft’s passover when we could only stare at each other waiting for life to resume. Initially this interruption was very disconcerting, for one did not play chess with Gary unless on occasion, one was able to dethrone the master - otherwise you'd never hear the end of it. This intense competitive drive held true 40 years later while bow shooting paper plate targets; he with his handcrafted implement of destruction, and me with my store-bought. I was content just to have a fun with my old friend; damn if he didn’t nearly twist himself into a knot if he didn’t bullseye a goodly percentage of the time . . 

How he managed to be so generous to me; while maintaining such a singular standard for himself was one of the characteristics which challenged and has informed my ethos, seeming to weave itself through our friendship and into vast regions of my personal beliefs. After high school, I was told by an instructor, “Cal Arts is fine, but if you really want to study art, you have to go to New York City", So I left for NYC. Sitting here now writing, I am certain I’d have never been able to muster the courage to make such a leap had I not been exposed to Gary’s creative self-confidence or his ability to shift from competition to mentoring the way others change channels on their TV. In between semesters in NYC, Gary again provided sanctuary and a couch; by this time in his artistic arc, he’d found a deep kinship with Hieronymus Bosch. I felt superior and cosmopolitan. I was unable to recognize the courage and independence his interest reflected. Like two petulant “legends in their own minds,” what had been collaboration and a shared respect for art devolved into an unhealthy struggle for primacy. During this interval, i executed a still life of a kitchen window with bottle and odd metal object, and he a more fantastical landscapes only conceivable within a rich and verdant intellectual interior; another lesson where Gary lead and I learned, or more accurately, am learning. He did not care what others thought in any of the circumstances of his life, and there is much about his life for which I have no real awareness. This lack of awareness holds true for many lost friends, but for Gary it is amplified by the vast spectrum of his capacity and interests. 

Before our paths wildly diverged, I found him running a live-in carpentry concern out of a boat in a dry dock between the 3 Arches and former Robert E. Lee restaurant on PCH. Again from his keen sense of taste and inexorable industry he was handcrafting fine art tabletop mosaics from painstakingly recessing fine woods into a frame that would become veneered and I imagine, lovingly owned by many in the oh-so-tony recesses of what had once been the semi-eclectic, now wholly subsumed corporate quagmire of “Newport Beach - The OC.” By then, we were two evenly matched antagonists giving each other elbow room; I could only discern the faintest outline of the shaggy Sasquatch Gary was to become in his later years. It wasn’t exactly fear I felt, or even unwelcome, but a feeling of rich bursting bark from a huge tree in its early days; one knows there will be much shade from such a growth, but unclear which way to step. It was almost like being at the doorstep of an artistic Henry Ford just as he was switching on “the assembly line” except that it was more like a beautiful “Rube Goldberg Machine” about to be let loose into the rapidly fraying social fabric of the late twentieth century pre-neocon meltdown.

It was no real big surprise then, when after 30 years of silence, and with the aid of the kind offices of his loving sister Janis, I was able to waylay our hero in the wilds of Shaver Lake, CA taming the soon to be chagrined lions of patriotism and trumpist fascism defined by the presidency of Mr. M.T. Suit. Whether the hick lions in whose den Gary lived become tame won't be revealed by Gary’s death; I’ve played chess with him and know enough to read nothing from a temporary victory, or tempt fate with an easily acquired objective. Mr. Cox was a patient man. I believe in the bottom of my heart that many of Gary’s objectives will not bear fruit for years to come, but that the same fascist braggadocio trumpeted by hick haters who may, or may not have harried our hero in his last days, will fall like plankton into the yaw of Moby Dick to be swallowed up by a much greater purpose than is apparent in this temporal plane. Gary had the unique ability amongst humans to combine the very most dangerous inclinations of competition with noble objectives of openness and candor and the more useful, however fashionable, traits of feint and obfuscation into a rhythm of life. In the end the burden of disappointment and frustration may have been too much for one man to live with alone - my fault for not having provided greater support and cover fire to one so determined to live a life of dignity and humility while provoking growth and question within the greater body politic.

may you rest in peace friend - it was my privilege to know, and to love you like the brother you had been . . 


Joseph T Stevens

Friday, January 20, 2017

family / not-family - the sonnet


Family behavior could be imagined similarly to the genetic lineage defined by the DNA molecular form. It is customary in this age of “Child Rearing for Dummies” to emphasize a single generation of child rearing, when in fact any learned parenting style is derived from several generations each applying some blended variation from preceding themes. For example, family constellations wherein the father is a remote disciplinarian and the children are encouraged to fear him as a threat; it is very likely the grandchildren will perceive some level of danger from older authoritarian males regardless of how loving, or nurturing that grandchild’s birth father might be; sibling hierarchies too, will reflect patterns found several generations removed - echoes in a canyon where the original sound is no longer distinguishable; Multigenerational patterns of behavior become dangerous when it interferes with the vitality of humanity’s trunk. Our inherent biological imperative to replicate is confused by social systems antagonistic to the greater good when they blunt or manipulate the intrinsic human urge to learn into a distorted demand to believe. The branches of our species have begun to wither and die due to a lack of existential nutrition - the intangible comfort that comes from living a fulfilled existence manifesting in cultural foliage reflected in the higher attributes of civilization - art, literature and music. Today we are told the dreck that constitutes commercial success is the apex of our capabilities when all it represents is that which is sold.

We’ve become so removed from our roots, that we believe that a handful of wealthy citizens are the best representation of human capacity. Nothing could be further from the truth that every child born is capable of doing their best, and that the single best effort of any one child is the most noble, vital and worthwhile objective of any social system, much less by a group as complex as humanity. Imagine how differently our world might be were our forest populated by trees at war with themselves as we seem to be with each other. Could a Sequoia have ever reached it regal stature had it burned itself to the ground continuously for no other reason than destroying its enemy? Or is the Sequoia more of a reflection of divinity than all of our human clerics combined? The Sequoia organized itself cooperatively enough to transport moisture from lacy roots up through thousands of feet of dense pulp strong enough to support tons of mass and then out to remote vesicles of chlorophyll which are delicate enough to blow away in a strong wind. Is there any part of this magnificent living organism that would withhold nutrition or moisture from the rest just to be wet? Do you see roots choking off water or worse polluting the trunk with adulterated water? So why have we, a supposedly advanced creature, allowed a minuscule portion of our kind to seize our very prerogative; to distort our vision such that we are willing to murder our own kind for the benefit of a handful of profiteers? How have we allowed one skin tone to ascribe malevolence to another, or better yet encouraged one skin tone to prey on itself? 

Like it or not humanity is born of a handful of hardy beasts that found ways to cooperatively coexist in a violent world full of climate extremes, ferocious creatures faster and more wild than we and still possess the grace to achieve the finesse of the “Mona Lisa,” or complex arrangement of sound created by Mozart. It is because that was a time when we were closer our trunk; there was less dead wood from senseless excess; wars, believe it or not, were fewer and farther between. It wasn’t before WWI when civilian body counts became numbers used to inflame passions of the homeland. Prior to that time armies unaided by the “industrial revolution” required willing laborers eking out a living feeding warriors and arming professionals. Today the ruling class has you paying “The Military Industrial Complex” for the privilege of being defended from without, but murdered and betrayed from within. The only benefit of war - profit - now belongs to a handful of people from any country; at home or abroad. It is a shell game without the pea. You will never be safe and you will never find an end to war by fighting one another - not with them, not with your family, your homies or your spouse. As long as we acknowledge superiority of any other human being more than that honor you do yourself by making the highest contribution to the greatest number of people regardless of your own personal benefit, we as a species are doomed.

We have been indoctrinated to believe others are more important, therefore they, the big shots are entitled to possess more. We have been schooled to believe that violence is the natural order of the universe which is true, but if you believe a collapsing star is peaceful, imagine a mother’s fury at the death of a child as a razor’s edge and ask yourself how constructive that edge is gonna be before it is dulled. There is nothing that could compensate for the pain of loss from a loved one's death for any reason, much less murder or war. So why have we arranged ourselves as a society to lavish fantastic sums of wealth into the laps of a handful of people who have done very little but perpetuate more war? How is it healthy for us as a species to give our consent to be governed by those riding in limousines, helicopters and warships without an iota of return, except to those materially benefitting from the arrangement. Is it the fantasy that if you are loyal enough, or quiet enough or crooked enough, that somehow you will claw and scrape yourself up out the muck where you have been assigned as a root to provide moisture to those upper limbs of the organization; you’re a root and no pine cone is ever gonna give its seeds to you; or is it that your lot in life is being stuck out on a limb, when all you long for is the intrinsic coalescing identity that only a root can know; but if you suck up enough moisture and endure enough seasons, somehow your cone will produce a magic seed and get blown on to a fertile patch of the forest where with enough luck, your seed will sprout and if you’re not devoured as a seedling by a passing fawn or culled as undergrowth by the timber industry, after a few thousand millennia you too will be a towering Sequoia? 

One of the most tragic results in the ruling class war on learning is the loss of imagination to appreciate just how rare our existence is within the barely quantifiable vacuum of the universe - to fully understand how odd our predicament is as a species so reliant on moisture to stay alive, or how vulnerable our lives are to extremes of temperature. We are something like the bumpkin at the county fair seeing a hall of mirrors for the 1st time and unable to orient as our forebears had to in order to motivate through to the next valley before winter set in, or lake dried up. Our concept of cooperation is so stifled and deformed that we imagine a CEO or celebrity as a reflection of ourselves and confirmation of our hopes and dreams for love and caring rather than a cruel mirage by a bloodless carney who understands if he works it right, you might just pay him for a 2nd trip thru the hall. The irony of a tree metaphor in this essay is that we are now eliminating forests of trees to furnish some delusion of taste to some human being whose hunger has become so enflamed by addiction to sugar that all s/he knows is hunger - just so some snot born on “Third Base” can bullshit you into to believing he’s a home run, and if you play your cards right - he might let you kiss his ass. When in fact the woman sweeping the empty cups from the Super Bowel stadium after the game is closer to the dignity and nobility of the spirit which gay-Leonardo da Vinci was able to fathom from sitting in quiet with Señora Gioconda for many long years, respecting her without ever once having to grab her kitty. 

Leonardo da Vinci — “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

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not-family - the sonnet

Not-family is an oxymoron;
By saying “that is your problem - not mine”
You blunt your ability for compassion
Thinking what is lost is easy to find.

If alone, are not all you meet the same?
Yet, as part of many are you too, not one?
Could a child know fierce without parent tame,
Where violence can only maim when done?


Is anyone not brother or sister?
What old person is not your own parent?
Harm a child is to kill your own future,
So what good is thick blood with bad intent?

Learn to communicate with animals;
It'll be their history after ours falls.


jts 012017 

http://http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com