fake - an essay ·:·

I began this essay in November 2014, then read 5 paragraphs of bullshit at Christmas which became February 2015; March 2015; April 2015 . . . I could barely read what was written - all fake. I was alone within a community I had chosen at the end of a long journey after my father’s death. I did not belong and would never be able to fake it. Three years ago, at the onset of this major life transition and full with a grief I could barely face, an existing breech between ma and myself was torn asunder which no amount of hard physical labor could expunge; with no other channel available, I began to write letters. During this very cold past winter my greatest warmth came from working on the portrait of a “perfect stranger” with whom I had once shared a four hour flight; this woman had thoroughly captivated my imagination and my heart, but outside of drawing her I was unable to express myself. I had begun drawing her repeatedly during this upheaval having obtained her kind permission obliquely through fb. Her features seemed to guide me through the labyrinth of grief. Where I have struggled to be gentle with ma - to reassure her that her hardscrabble logic had found traction in my fighting-to-stay-open heart and mind - the photos of this stranger from which I worked simply drew love from me, so I reached out to this perfect stranger asking her to witness my words to ma as an oversight, again obliquely, hoping my affection for a stranger might attenuate language which I’ve come to understand can be rapier-like, hardly kind. I included 2 other muses, women I have known from well-to-barely, but mostly addressed this perfect stranger in the portrait and ma. The portraits improved, but as you might imagine, it got weird. While this convoluted grieving process infused the portraits with feeling that I may not have accessed otherwise, and my overlong restricted heart warmed for ma through this act of intentional writing, I am now faced with a complex of rich though incomplete feelings: gratitude to ma for my existence; gratitude to my muses for their generosity of spirit and special gratitude to this woman in the portrait for allowing me to love her vicariously with abandon while having no idea what she feels - however confused that may seem. 

Confusion factors into some of the reasons why the concept of fake holds so much fascination and is such a challenge for me to depict. Why, for example would I tear my chest open and share something real with you - another form of stranger? Is it an effort to create belonging which is absent from my life, or is it a real effort to find the heart of existence? As you may imagine possessing such an amorphous perimeter of self and other, my previous 3 marriages have been evolving works in progress - more work than progress. Yet as with any skill, relationships tend to improve the more you persevere, and while poor choices can as easily serve to focus one’s areas of weakness, they may also lead to labyrinths in which to hide from growth. With enough poor choices they either become lessons from which to learn hard personal truths, or millstones dragging you to the bottom. Had I stopped at wife number one, I’m not sure whether I could have developed the intestinal fortitude adequate to expose my tenuous grasp of reality with whomever might be reading this essay just now. However, any anxiety I might feel about your reading this essay is nothing compared to the threat I experience from a handful of people capable of applying remarkably precise filters to a media stream which has become nothing more than a worldwide database as easily manipulated as the bank tracks your financial transactions. Either of which is dwarfed by the stomach-turning anxiety that comes from facing one’s deepest fear which is for me loving and being loved - big surprise.

You may be saying to yourself, “with three failed marriages, what the fuck does this guy expect?” A fair question - I expect love. Nor am I suggesting there is anyone on the planet responsible for my lack of it. My life lessons have convinced me that nearly all human activities not specifically in service of love are efforts to assuage an emptiness from the lack of love so well described when Peggy Lee sang, “is that all there is?” Does this mean your favorite sports star is a surrogate for a brother afraid of his own hate, or any fascination for celebrity could be attributed to an older sister who made you walk behind her to school? Fake is when something is trotted out as real, by someone who knows full well and good that what is being proffered is not real, or worse partially real which is almost as bad maybe worse. The best example of this may be the cynical efforts by community leaders to inspire the young poor that somehow excelling at a playground sport might provide a path out of the hell which the uber-rich have created to neuter their opponents - the 99.999% rest of us. The difference between this and the gladiator spectacles of old is so minute that the entertainment industry is entirely comfortable dressing up today’s star as hero of the downtrodden in one sort of uprising film or another; always, however stopping just short of a careful examination of the root causes for our alienation from each other.

The fundamentals of salvation are reserved for the wizards of religion who are in no great hurry to vacate their positions of authority with all the financial perks and adulation which come from rescuing humanity from itself. The only real danger for the zealots of our age will be if there is any validity to claims of afterlife and the consequences of bad living. What is heaven, what is hell? Damn good questions except that the only meaningful conversation is whether we are making either condition real for ourselves and those around us at this instant - anything else is posturing. To live a conviction other than how to tangibly improve the lives of those around you or those with whom who share the planet can only result in greater doubt, more fear and stronger hatred for anyone not sharing your conviction - possibly including any actual savior, who I believe, as many do, resides within our own troubled hearts. Where the zealots and I part company is whether higher consciousness is mine or theirs. Today too many assume roles in the salvation of others, perhaps due to the emptiness each feels within their own skin - why else would I take the time to share these feeble reasons for doing good. Truth be told, it beats hell out of acting on fear or occasional fits of pique which are nearly always directly attributable to fear.

Although sometimes fear can be our friend. Take for example, my terror of love (please take it) - sometimes the absence of love is so great I could reach out and take its hand, usually when I am in the midst of nature and her kind beauty, or amongst those kindred spirits who are also drawn to the mysterious warmth of love and collect in pools like dew drops on a leaf. I prefer love to all the other phantoms in our midst, for it cannot be faked; nor is there a power on the planet capable of bending love to its will; I admire anything or anyone capable of such independence in these days when our own mother earth has been pimped by the lackeys and running dogs of those handful of humans whose only recognizable feature is fake - wealth; the .01% richest human beings who occupy the throne of our collective future by default rather than merit or any value for the greater good. I do not fear those faux princes, death, thugs or any of the endless spectres parading across the flickering brain prison of the “information super highway,” I fear my own willingness to believe lies made real by my own hungers. So am I fake, yes. Did I overcome my fear to cross the threshold and speak to my Madam Muse, yes. Has my soul been redeemed . . ? I don’t know; ¿do you?

jts 1/4/2015

http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

all rights reserved 

∞

memorial without memory - the sonnet

My Father is gone never to return,

yet he’s going down the road right now with us.

Often he shared from a page where he’d learned

how to have fun without making a fuss

These words right now are new to each of you

which is as close as i can get to Pop,

for that’s how it was with us - always new.

For him, the past was just another stop.

If i had to take a guess, he’d be honored now

to have a hand in such depth of feeling.

He worked for love, and it mattered not how,

going so far as to beg for it kneeling. 

His brave heart asked each to make their choices,

or each find a muse to give us voices.

jts 21 September 2011 stoneartist.com 

my Father's memory - the sonnet

As my father lay dying, I was asleep

until my brother woke me at his house.

I exclaimed to the phone, Pop made no peep;

gone I know, Pop thought of me not a louse. 

Some months from that date I will participate

in festivities to honor his death.

We made our “good-byes before it was too late.

What i learned from Pop weren’t in his last breath.

What i learned from Pop will be how i die,

for he so much loved life’s sweet mystery.

No one knows when and where our souls to fly . . 

that could be his cackle in yonder tree .  .

it won’t matter when or where once we’ve gone;

what counts is what we’ve stacked our love upon.

jts 20 September 2011 
http://stoneartist.com 

fake - the sonnet

i am writing an essay about fake,

this ersatz sonnet was as far as i'd got;

actually i had found another take;

what is not fake? this sonnet? bloody snot?

the death of a parent is very real; 

mowing weeds on a hot day is just that.

selling poison as useful is just spiel -

more sellout violence kept under the hat.

fair weather love, the bluster of hate . . .

the list just goes on and on - life will end,

with it hate, yet love goes on - g_d’s grand fate . .

or .. her final joke - balance does not bend.

what’s good will never be found encoded . .. ...

but by good done with dust of bones long dead. 

jts 22 march 2015 stoneartist.com 

lady on the mountain - the sonnet

there could be more, having so much mountain - 

though at the mount one becomes not lady, 

anymore than being at peace is human - 

neither condition is a malady. 

so why not either, more ladies or peace?

many can fake being at peace or regal,

but being mountainous, mountains cannot cease,

as her soul can but soar like an eagle.

and just how to find one, or better - both?

peace is a mountain; it is there or not, 

and when seeking ladies, leave those who loathe

and go somewhere when not found, peace is sought.

i’m old and betters have said, “ seek your root“

- perhaps - mountainside - a tree - lady fruit?

jts 23 april 2015 stoneartist.com 

Art

As I write this, I am 61 years old; my father taught high school English and was a poet; my mother taught middle school Art and is an artist. I was alone on a ferry between Amsterdam and London for my 17th birthday; pop had picked up a Volkswagen van on his way to Greece with his new wife and her child where he wrote poetry during a sabbatical year. I was on a vision quest and was guided into sculpting by a kindly pottery teacher who also happened to be a Professor of art at the University in Brighton. Vision quest is shorthand for dissipated youth, or "Do your thing" which at that time was more than a commercial on MTV. That I didn’t die with a needle in my arm is due largely to the kind encouragement of that professor. I share this not in false intimacy with you, or to do 12-step on your dime, but so you may sense the scope of commitment I feel toward an activity which goes back to the dawn of our collective history - Art. The possibility that I may be living amongst the last artist/shamans is an irony that cowers from even my vivid imagination however addlepated with age or blunted by fear that once vivid imagination may have become.

Mark Rothko was a color field painter whose demand became stratospheric after his suicide. He was betrayed by fellow artist, friend and executor of the estate Theodore Stamos an instructor at the Art Students League of NYC where I attended some 5 years after the death of Rothko. His betrayal by a friend for profit was background noise to the saintly influence of my friend and mentor Jose De Creeft - a 90 year old Spaniard. There is a photo of him and our class at a Christmas party at the League; he had placed his hand on my head where I had knelt for the group photo. He was always doing funny shit like that. For example, he showed me a painting of him greated by an admirer depicting herself with an arm around his shoulder; in the version he shared with me; he'd painted over her as an elephant with its trunk around his shoulder; in another fanciful piece he'd modeled a rat upright grasping a nut to its cheeks in a cake pan full of nuts and bolts. I am heir to this irreverence which is all that constitutes my bonafides as artist, more so than the 1,000’s of studio hours; erudite lectures or museum wandering which comprise part of the very real and necessary training required to call oneself “artist,” I have never faired well calling myself an artist; it was decades before I’d whisper that word out loud, so strong was my aversion to the  dilettantes I have watched occupy the high ground of creative commerce.

Lucky me - my training became a battle not much different than the one for the soul of Charlie Sheen in the movie “Platoon.” My soul dangled for decades between the heinous betrayal of Mark Rothko and the sacred - the same conflict between time and product over which Michelangelo and Pope Pious struggled; the Pope, according to Vasari, dispatched the political apparatus of the time to retrieve the renegade Michelangelo from his native Florence over a disagreement about what exactly the artist should turn his hand to next. Nor was it as cut and dry as today’s purely venal criteria of successful industrial artists, (however the fuck that is determined), for Michelangelo was a reverential soul believing deeply in the sanctity of his work - today sacred art is the almighty buck; this sad fact plays out all up and down the line, except that today’s budding “creatives” are used as clickbait fisherman with pre and post consumer filters for targeted demographics creating content that is then pushed and prompted into viral celebrity. "Liked" keystrokes are harvested as trending tastes, making some rich fuck a little richer and better able to leverage whatever the puppeteers of the gladiator "art wars" wish to serve up as top tier culture - talk about your hamster on a treadmill.

Art has been hijacked by the profane precisely at that point in our odd human history when a mystical vision for that successful existential hunt which might guide humanity through the horrific danger we face as a species. Nearly every contemporary artist I know today is fully and completely absorbed by the financial reality and need for celebrity status and commensurate business model which provides excess inventory; outsider cache and/or wall space in the “big house” - papa museum. Many artists are diverted from the sacred to commercial validation by the tempting influence of the corporate media. Hypocrite that i am, i too proffer this content to you, an unknown reader, scrapping for “keystrokes” or other viral bounty that might translate into pennies with with which to continue my quixotic petition into that same marketplace - another traitor in the mix. My alma mater, "The Art Students League of NYC” has been subsumed by a bitter internecine squabble over a proposed overhanging shard of "capital" from the newly adjacent highest skyscraper in NYC. This project was shoehorned into the rapidly gentrifying Manhattan and is a perfect metaphor for struggle of our age - human being vs corporation.

A more perfect example of the rich and their role in art training today could not be written into the annals of history regardless of scholarship or arcane grasp of the classics. For some $25 million the developer for the adjacent skyscraper bought the airspace over the League to hang a cantilevered outcropping of penthouses into perpetuity, or until they collapse onto the studios below.  These penthouses provide a clear view of Central Park making them priceless, but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heritage four story art school in midtown Manhattan; understand that the origins of the Art Students League were purely democratic, wherein much like the origin of universities in the middle ages, students intent on organizing and seizing control of their own education, rejected academy doctrines and formed their own “league.” Students at the league when I attended were expected to be responsible for the nature and direction of their own studies, while instructors were hired to provide insights from actual working artists - a proletariate art school of worker artists. Had the league retained this orientation for training hard charging independent creative souls, rather than negotiating away paltry “airspace” rights for a lousy $25 million, the board of control could have sold the entire existing lot for 100s of times more dollars, then relocated the school to a much larger compound and invested that money toward the original mission of art training rather than vetting art harlequins to dance at the dissolution of the human species - today's modern art "scene."

jts 11/21/2014

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

http://stoneartist.com   

post apocalyptic living

The idea that there will be some demarcation for the collapse of empire is ludicrous, and I’m not referring to the celebrity of the same name. Much of the thinking and emphasis by our wiser counselors today focuses on some timeframe or order of events - this happens before this .  . The reality is we are more like a large ocean going vessel who came at the dock too hard and as a result will cause much damage to the dock and ship, or if your vision is linear, we can listen to our bard Bob Dylan . “ . I think when my back was turned the whole world behind me burned . “ . However you are able to fix in your mind the image of an irretrievable past against an indifferent future you’ll be on your way to preparing your gene pool as possible survivors of the species, if there be any. Dire you say, no actually you say - the disintegration of all human convention into a hollow cutout can be described by the mechanical “thank you” from any harried retail worker; the fake air of authority from that employed bureaucrat declining your loan application or appreciating your time for making the job application. The retail worker is not thanking you anymore than the bureaucrat has any remorse for stepping in front of your ambition. Both are clinging to a portioned out illusion no different than the the stories of heroism in defense of a sacred religion where no congregation on the planet is not without stories of betrayal and excess at the hands of its clerics - not one.

In our world we are no longer given the courtesy of being assured you’re fucked. In the olden days a tyrant would flat out say - you’re a slave, and you are not. Today’s leadership is dodgy and covert having discovered people want to believe the best even at the expense of food, air, water and wellbeing. As long as there is a plausible explanation or identifiable culprit for the momentary lapse - we will not be unlike the “Titanic” merrily humming along until the vessel’s momentum slowly crushes the hull of the ship rendering it useless and destroying that part of the landing which gave purpose to the ship. The degree and extent of destruction is all that is being discussed now because the laws of physics don’t care what you think, feel or believe. The process now becomes one of salvage; which in turn becomes an issue of priority. For example, the mother on the dock with her baby in her arms knows in her heart she and the child are not safe where they are standing. Just like that moment on a bicycle when the physics of falling overcome the physics of riding there is no intellectual consideration, one tucks and rolls with bodies and objects broken relative to the instincts of those involved. In the case of the mother, she runs for higher ground or not.

It is this time for our incinerating planet; some, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out disproportionately represented by the indigenous 1st nation people are instinctively preparing for the collision by focusing on where the planet is showing the greatest stress, water, air and food. Whether this leadership and foresight will mitigate enough of the collision to aid in salvaging the contents of our colliding vessel or leave enough of the dock intact to help in the process of building another ship only time will tell. Though as with all catastrophic events or as Bruce Lee describes the proper pace for boxing, time will slow to a crawl and what happens in an instant will seem like forever. Whether this distortion of time will aid in strategies to ameliorate some of the death and suffering we have begun to enjoy as a way of life is anybody’s guess, but there are many steps that can be taken now, up to and after impact. For one, almost as though g_d in her infinite wisdom provides tools for our salvation equivalent to the potential for destruction. For example at the inception of the Industrial Age humans were treated as farm stock to be worked, fed and clothed no more than was necessary for maintenance. However just as communication improvements were an outgrowth of industrialization and improved technology the close proximity which centralized industrial centers fostered, also created strong inter-community bonds and additional exposure to the world’s stockpile of knowledge.

This gave rise to the illusion that was Marxist thinking - the only thing required for a worker’s paradise was to kill off the ruling class - unfortunately this myopic vision of the human animal evolved as George Orwell opined in “Animal Farm” and one tyrant was supplanted for the next over time. Yet that hopefully informed scenario is not dissimilar to our onrushing Ocean Liner, for as certainly as oppression will be vanquished, our ship shall crash into the “Dock of the Bay.” Like the farm animals in Orwell’s story, we have the technical wherewithal to achieve extraordinary change. Regardless of the pig’s narrow vision and subsequent defeat we have between now and impact, both collectively and individually; not only the knowhow to soften the impact but the capability to hit the ground running. Unless we are to repeat the errors of all previous revolutions this massive undertaking cannot be on our own behalf but on behalf of the human unborn 2, 3, 4 or more generations hence, if we are that lucky. If we can take our cues from the more intuitive 1st nation members of the world body, luck has has a place in human history - look at Bill Gates for example, bought Quick and Dirty Disc Operating System (Q-Dos) for a song and then sweated bullets until IBM sold the farm distracted by its manic greed for absolute control over hardware with absolutely no clue what software even meant - now Billy will be the world’s first trillionaire and IBM has become a faded “hasbeen” like the Republican Party and it lilywhite adherents.

Unfortunately the chimera of 0s and 1s that constitute that remarkably ethereal fortune are little different than the hash marks on the first clocks when they could make a second hand sweep - of little import other than a gross approximation for concept of time from which we spring from and back into completely unaffected by war, money, fame or sorrow. The pool of human wisdom as distinguished from the chaff of today’s information gluttons should be ruggedized, standardized and decentralized such that fire, flood and famine in any one location will not impair the ability to immediately redistribute itself. The ecosphere itself must gain legal protections as Bolivia has begun by attributing legal rights to mother earth herself. Communities for self-sufficiency will needs be the standard organization as the empty product of the corporate overlords becomes increasingly desperate in its attempts to retain market share, for once the ruse of the infinite growth paradigm becomes crystal clear for its role in the exhaustion of the world’s resources politically, intellectually and economically, as Edward Colver has said there will not be walls high enough behind which the ruling class may hide. Fury cannot be the barrel of this assault; we do not have that margin. Socrates said,”the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” For those amongst you who’d shrug off Socrates , I say to you “oh well.”

see more @ http://stoneartist.com