Maria Sabina - “There’s a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible”
I have spent more time in the past week than i would have liked wiping a disc from a former machine. The machine was my constant companion after the death of my father while i lived in virtual seclusion within a virulent conservative enclave in the high desert of California. It is as close i care to get to spending time in Mr. M.T. Suit’s white house. This machine had accompanied me across four continents and a dozen countries while i searched for a quiet place to live out my days and do whatever work i can manage as a doddering old fool. Soon after i arrived where i now live, it crashed to the floor as i reached for it in the middle of the night - the too-heavy laptop tumbled off the nightstand and refused to wake up. The short answer is i opted to sully my soul and replace it with a much lighter version of the same machine - there are not enough paragraphs to describe the frustration of having to make decisions about what to transfer standing at a counter speaking a barely coherent version of a 2nd language to a man whose contempt, was only exceeded by the greed in his eyes. For 10 months this broken carcass of a machine sat in a closet as a painful reminder of the precarious nature of computer augmented experiences, mostly as a concession to the reality that no one really wants to see, what used to be your “slides,” but is now just hour after hour of scrolling photos. As an afterthought to an xmas eve dinner, i gifted this thought to be dead digital vault to a pair of brothers for what i had imagined as forensic examination/destruction - asking only if there was any data that could be retrieved it be treated securely and returned to me - all of this of course in my garbled wannabe-a-native-speaker enthusiasm. From there it just went down hill, quickly. The next day, xmas morning already feeling queasy about having cast off one more remnant of my tattered history i was faced with whether or not to pick up the pile of shit some merry maker left across the narrow street from my window. I picked it up because that beats the shit out of leaving it for someone else; i then found out soon after my former best friend who i had thought died was in fact alive and responding to electricity.
I was able to narrow my mixed emotions down to the very real threat of having personal data floating freely in the world, nor was i able to convey the seriousness of my predicament to the new owners. 4 days later, i was able to secure the machine having no real expertise to do what was necessary. Were i a more gifted agent of kindness and decency the new owners would never have seen a frightened little boy alone in a foreign country demanding that they relinquish their new xmas booty. However, the question remains, was that delusion theirs, or mine? The reality is it was a dangerous position to be in and i behaved in my best interest not theirs. From where i now stand, that would make the delusion mine, not theirs - yet it was not fantasy that regardless of all other gestures of generosity to the contrary, they perceived my stubborn urgency as “indian giving,” which for me is a greater insult than if you called me a republican. How could the ensuing offenses and counter offenses been stymied out of the gate¿ 1) personal responsibility - had i taken whatever steps necessary to confirm the data was secure rather than shuffle that task off onto the shoulders of another 2) be clear about gift-giving motivations, was i more threatened by unsecured data, or the fact that rather than a broken castoff slated for destructive fun, the object was a living manifestation of my own precipitous behavior toward things of value - even what constitutes value. or 3) a missed opportunity for a more profound lesson on unexamined issues of attachment. C.G. Jung - “The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” My grandfather was diagnosed by one psychiatrist via the anguish of my just-divorced mother as a “classic” paranoid schizophrenic, of course this same “doctor” instructed me at the ripe old age of 15 to strip down to my underwear in his office whereupon he gazed for some-too-long a time. These are the days which constitute our slice of eternity - a time where common sense is no longer common, if it ever was.
The upshot is as recently as last night, my experience - that same experience which insisted i take extraordinary steps to protect personal data - was evaluating my evacuation - from here to where, and why? Is that unnatural, do i care? My upset at others for being disinterested in my plight is just that - my upset; i’ve gotten far enough to understand this truth. That is not to say i can’t, at times, be a spitting cat at the end of one’s wrist, but fuck - who can’t; it ain’t hard. What is hard is to be able to amplify a slight self awareness to a global scale and then consider the impact of such puerile, however honest behavior against the very slim odds that our species might survive the next 100 years - oofa. I am nearing the end of a drawing of Maria Sabina - a woman who was basically taken from quiet community healer to be pimped by the 60’s movers and shakers such that she was shot by an angry drunk from her village, the same village which also burned her house down in retaliation for bringing so many foreigners to what had been a quiet god-fearing community. The concept of an alternative reality is familiar to me, one might even say essential to my formative years - as though these ain’t formative years. What is riveting about the image by this unknown photographer is the interweaving of a visual collage of vaporous clouds with the ancient ruggedness of this woman’s beloved land. The image is so fundamental that there is no room for interpretation and defies any exacting depiction. What i am faced with is a subject which is so vast that however far i get into it - it continues to recede into the distance while giving off more and more information - sort of like a beautiful woman waving at you as she walks away. Maria Sabina’s life was solid enough to allow her image to persist across an expanse of cultural history and remain crystal clear regarding her essence. After aborted efforts to clean the disc of my resurrected, however much conflicted former best friend it came down to a single press of the button to eradicate 4 years of my existence.
After i had dropped my phone in Uruguay and was forced to confront my inner prompt to leave go the habit, i fantasized that i was cured of my addiction by simply by being without the object of desire, sadly that is the equivalent of crying from Sacramento to Los Angeles in a U-Haul thinking that would be the end of that marriage. Oddly i went through a similar confusion faced with the reanimation of my dead friend. How much time have i wasted scrolling through what turned out to be 20,000 some-odd jpeg files¿ it may be that what i was processing during this post-holyday clusterfuck was the dread of reliving days passed, and it doesn’t matter how far back you go, for amongst the 20k images were photos of my father, my great grandmother, myself and siblings from a family dynamic that no longer exists, or just as easily can never be erased from the face of the earth as long as our species survives. That fecund aspect is part of the majesty which i have found in the image of Maria Sabina, a majesty which i have failed to capture but which encourages me to believe i’m on the right trail. The time i have spent in the company of this beautiful human being can never be expunged from me, nor the lessons learned attempting to honor the life of someone i’d never met but whom i greatly respect as well as grieve for with only a marginal understanding of her suffering. Where it gets bizarre, is how this experience contrasts with my relationship to the gobs of photos i took of my own suffering father in his later days' struggle to remain alive. I will treasure the drawing i now have of Maria, yet the prospect of watching the surviving video of pop and i playing pool while he was still on his feet rests a little too closely to any other glut of media i now consider a burden, perhaps not much different than the cabinet of slides packed like sardines waiting for my sainted mother’s passing to get tossed. I say this not with indifference to the herculean task of guiding ma into the next world which has fallen on my brethren but simply nodding to the reality of my father’s slides wasting away in the same storage space which contains my own “slides” in the guise of stone carvings from my long life of fantasy as artist in a world which despises creativity.
Yes i am delusional, why do you ask? I even imagine there is a way our species might survive and like the beautiful Nepalese maid, i have no idea of how to depict such a magnificent beauty - but because my parents beat me at the first sign of surrender i plunge ahead - asses and elbows afraid one of them will catch me leaning on the rake and penalize me some portion of my “allowance” - kidding - sort of. What is real is the fact i am going to die, and soon depending on what scale you use to measure time. I enjoy the dumb luck of measuring my time by how close i can get to an honest depiction of whatever it is to which i am turning my aged hand; my ignorant miscalculation however is that i am currently painting using pencil points. Perhaps you are beginning to see what i mean by delusional. The question becomes, or has always been, whether art is for the artist or the patron which begs a larger question. Are we here at the behest of lords and ladies who have hijacked our existence using the “flim flam” of a supposed economy, or are we all of us independent agents of a greater purpose. I have been on both sides of the fence and was fired from my last job, for being too good at what i do. Literally - suffice it to say i got too close to reading who was doing who in one small corner of the L.A. Superior Court revenue stream. The edifice of our collective hallucination is teetering and without a very clear and very united gaze into the depths of our profound and inextricable relationship to each other, humanity is no more than a daisy chain around the twin towers just prior to collapse. I can say for myself during the past week any thought or idea of mine which varied an iota from the wellbeing of those in my immediate existence resulted in an emotional pustulence which i’d not wish on anyone. It would be fun at the end of this document to say, “well that about says it all for delusion,” guess again. Ironically, i’m getting a sense that the frontiers of delusion can be found amongst the myths of self and other - that magic time and place when we leap from the womb confused by the sudden absence of a beating heart which taught us so much about ourselves and our future
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truth - the sonnet
I learned this year “In Vino Veritas”
was used to vett the proposed laws of old.
Our truth today has no such wall to toss
drivel is passed out for justice - served cold.
Truth hasn’t changed - just became background noise
while brother/sister shit has gotten loud,
so loud “they” won’t give vino to the boys
instead “they” just start shooting at the crowd
truth, however has different ideas,
and runs down the slopes into the same sea
where everything big or small always does
unless you’re on a planet that can’t pee.
where we live, we fucked its only kidneys;
if it's prayer we wanted, we'd save our bees.
jts 01/08/2018
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
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