From KUNDERA: LOOKING FOR THE JOKE
with reference to the NY Review of Books article by Paul Wilson, Nov 5 – 18, 2015
THE POET/NOVELIST WHO ALERTED ME
TO THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
Milan Kundera was traumatised by the post 1968 Soviet terror after they smashed their tanks into Prague, destroying the simmering pro-democratic movement that had been warming-up for several years. But more fundamentally than that, Kundera was shocked by the lyricization of the pursuant Soviet terror. He wrote, “the only thing I deeply, avidly wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one literary genre rather than another, it was an outlook, a wisdom that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn furious, non-identification, considered not as evasion, as passivity or as a position; but a resistance, defiance, rebellion, a position.”
Kundera, the Czech novelist wrote about how the Soviet Terror used culture to plaster the walls outside of the gulags and the prisons with poems. People would recite, dance and sing before them, unknowingly drowning out the screams of their loved ones within.
UNFREEDOM
Today in the West, it is somewhat different. We are all imprisoned within the visual and aural walls of the popular media and inside the digital world of the internet. In both cases, this manufactured culture, with its manufactured truths, is used as an almost impenetrable wall of fragmented morality, nationalism, shards of religious claptrap, and a hallmark card tidal wave of lachrymose emotional sentimentality to defuse and confuse our psyches with inessential cultural detritus.
Much of this adds up to the editors, publishers and hacks of the ‘free press’ letting us know that ‘we are lucky because we are free’. This advertising-slick message really means, ‘whilst you are overseen by the national security state, and rejected at the doors of the media managers, you are free to consume what you can afford, given your credit rating. You are free to be enslaved by an anti-critical and anti-intellectual education and by our educational debts, our mortgages and general consumption. We are free to live as WAGE SLAVES in lives of UNFREEDOM. Those who object are not dragged into Soviet style prisons or worse, but are left outside in the cold, alone, without much of a voice.
If there is to be any kind of change towards not only creating true democracy but also to saving our species from the ever-mounting effects of the climate crisis, whatever we do as outsiders must be done while keeping in mind that we need to challenge and change the cultural assumptions of our friends and neighbours and so many other. Our voices need to be their voice. We need to imagine how to make new ideas attractive. For me, this is the most compelling task for artists today.
AN ELDERLY POETRY
Since the age of 19 or so I have been documenting people’s lives lived inside capitalism and democracies owned and controlled by corporations, the ultra-wealthy and their purchased political servants. Although my films, books and stills, have probably been seen by millions of people in over 40 countries across these years, but of course I feel I have not done enough.
In the last few years, I have begun to think that having addressed the world via film and photography within a style of realism, I am now, in my wanning years beginning to think that I need to turn towards a more poetic expression. It has become clear to me that I am as often wordless as I am pictureless in that some things simply cannot be sufficiently described with either. The neoliberal establishment have made all too many things undiscernible.
And this to…
DREAMING of YOU
During my nights
I swim sharply in harsh waters,
drenched ,shivering to these bones.When I can,
when physics and myself allow me,
I peer at stars above leaping seahorses
dreaming then of you.
rg 18 April 2023
When art exclaims against the status quo, when it argues for the as yet unobtained dreams of change and hope, it is arguing for truths as yet unresolved. Without this deep-seated opposition, art is simply a lie, a decoration, an entertainment or propaganda.
The US is turning into a theocracy and an autocracy. Everything here is turning to shit!
Art will not save us. Only utter outrage driven by millions shouting from every corner has any hope
of awakening the citizens from their slumber and driving them to fear.