being - the essay
The world is crawling out from under a plague siege; a princely oligarchy holds our wealth for ransom; and two of the world’s greater powers are saber rattling with tyrannical impotence, while the fount of judeo-christian wisdom is committing genocide with my tax dollar. Two personal delusions i have used as raison d'être, art and literature, ebb and flow in force and fun; a cataract impaired vision has been returned to me, such that were i a 20-something rake again full of piss and vinegar, the world might very well be my oyster, but am more like a devolving infant in a playpen full of aphorisms and snippets of experience with which i still try to defend my right to exist. Dreams of recognition and accomplishment rise like vapor and dust rather than the sturm and drang i applied before as traction while i slogged ever onward toward the idyl of fame and fortune, my 4G signal swamped by 5G white noise. I know not what to do, may have never known · the glacial sheet of self-doubt forming and reforming, dragging boulders across the moraines of my fractured ego exuding a past-like wisdom, not yet compassionate, more urine plume from rusting corrugation on some remote desert roadway.
However all is not lost, and my super-simplified life provides moments of clarity - a self restraint practiced over years rising from embankments of chaos; kindness without motive and tolerant acceptance, the inevitable subduction of life force by the ‘impenetrable’ Tao of Einstein’s god. As my personal power diminishes; the nuisance of absent wifi contrasts with fantasies of internettedness, or its commensurate value for amplifying literary conceits. I find instead a barren landscape of harsh realities about relatedness, fear and love. For example, the delusion of belonging anywhere for me has been based on a super-abbreviated period of my youth after which the mysterious all-giving bosom of family vanished into a feeding frenzy amongst my kin for things that were at one time our family estate. In a self righteous and sanctimonious repudiation of their avarice, i chased prestige and freedom, with an insatiable appetite.
If i must be hungry, i would rather hunger for understanding, the type of understanding i’ve gained from a lifelong effort to comprehend art and literature and its role for humanity. In the midst of one domestic collapse, i spent an entire weekend which seemed an instant, affixed to Henry Fielding's “The history of Tom Jones - a Foundling.” There is much about that particular domestic collapse which isn’t worth a backward glance, yet the cogent discourse on issues of courage, confusion, commitment and forgiveness i discovered within the history of Tom Jones inform my thinking to this day. Then it gets dicey, how does any wisdom derived from that reading translate into comparable value for the time it has taken you to read this essay? Would more explicit images of my personal experience aid you in better understanding our world? - that i write in protest/reaction-formation/entertainment withdrawal from an intermittent internet; that there is a fraught-ribbed dog with a diseased eye and his equally cadaverous pack outside the door of my current hovel; who voices howls that hold my soul in thrall more so than the poser exertions of my covertly mendacious interest in the creative process or that i've created my 'virtual' sangha willingly under the puerile supervision of a surveillance culture financed by the taxes of my slave wages during 5 decades of skimming from my ‘gainful employment’ in service of a visible means of support’? Please don’t all answer at once . ..
I have simplified my life at great personal cost, including the sacrifice of two intrinsic conceits - my value to our culture as a sculptor of stone, painter of purpose and author of merit - i derived enormous pleasure from each activity but the logistics demanded for them are not commensurate with the return. That is not to say that what i have created in those mediums lacks value, far from it. It is a simple financial fact defined by Dame Paradox and her offsprings T’is and T’ain’t, my life's work is not significant enough as a market share to finance the cost of my old age, much less the tax of interring my remains. I may be crazy, but i’m not stupid. There is a Youtube record of me making what i thought was no idle claim to destroy all of my stone carvings before i die; i was neither insincere, nor purely venal at the time; i was motivated by conceit and umbrage that what i had spent a lifetime creating would be subsumed by a corrupt and non-constructive industrial art establishment that opts for veneer over substance; then i got old; as delusion after delusion was dismantled by delammination of body and soul from decrepitude, i was forced to examine more closely personal fictions based on dubious ego-based assumptions, often derived from traumas of my own making.
All at the expense of the superlative creative dynamic inherent to our species. For example, a documentary i just watched on Shakespeare stated simply due to his prolific use of new words and word combinations, that 1 in 10 of our world's English language expressions are derived from his writings, yet in my own desiccated, effete search for originality, i have just dithered overlong about using ‘delammination,’ because of on an inert algorithm’s red underline; that is insane. I write like i draw, paint, sculpt, write or love, because it gives me a pleasant visceral confirmation about my thinking when loving; i see the radiant reflection of one other’s love; a feeling that draws me to the core of existence. When creating visual artifacts i search for that same reflection of love in a glance, expression or faithful interpretation of the terrain and flora we share, or in words, clear ideas that comprise the warp and woof of our fading human light.
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Buddha Head, easter morning · a sonnet
I set the broken egg on the table.
The girl smiled handing me the portrait bust
of Buddha before unavailable -
though the shirt i wore said 'in him i trust.'
She'd found the head in beans used to protect;
so well it worked his loss unknown t'il found.
Are we so yoked, ours to what we select;
or is ours what we find going around?
I missed it not, yet found to lose again,
or it had never been gone; i was lost.
Here and gone are baby signposts - whose in?
When no one is in, it comes at great cost.
In either case, what's lost is never gone
because light by its nature makes dawn.
jts 25/02/2022
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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