WHAT DO WE LIVE FOR?
What do we think of others who make people's life a misery
I met her.
She was elegant, intelligent, honourable, dignified,
kind and as a grace note,
she was beautiful.
I fell in love with her.
I hoped she’d fall in love with me.
FASCISTS, NATIONALISTS, RACISTS, NARCISSISTS
We live with ever more dictatorial leaders,
with the threats of spreading fascism and world wars,
with the menace of climate change,
with the mass of people, sleeping through these vital times of change,
and I have crazy love.
SHE LOVED STONE ANGELS.
She loved pure light, salmon coloured skies.
This woman wrote letters to herself, to someone like herself,
perhaps they were drawn like notes from the living to the dead,
perhaps they were the opposite:
wisdom passed down from accumulated experience.
The darkened hallways of memory desired to consume her papers,
to leave an indelible ash for history to consider.
She wrote
“I am still here.
I write and watch myself writing.
I eat and think of myself eating.
Always two parts of a whole
but never (save when I sleep) complete.”
“Ah, there it is."
She had caught herself again in the same dream:
The atom or the body?
A single number or a compound figure?
Scratching in her pad or tapping the computer?
The individual or the aggregate?
The aggregate?
'What do I mean?' she asked.
We? Us?
Joined in joy?
Assembled in conviviality?
A cafe society?
Like minds in unfettered exchange?
A union of folk?
A confederacy of all
with hands clasping each other.
Yes a union of all.
Those pictures from children's books:
profiles of yellow, red, black, brown and white,
with heads held high,
eyes seeing the same future.
A WOUNDED PLACE*
We are in a time of huge transition
from relative stability for the middle and working classes
to betrayal and instability for many of us.
The earth is dying but not yet unrecoverable.
Nations are being strangled by the narrow visions
of nationalism, racism, over sexualization, moral guilt
and the desperate pursuit for personal wealth.
In towns and country sides
people are made ill by poisons spreading across farms and fields,
by increasing isolation,
especially for the elderly and for young people,
as individuals are overwhelmed
by their seeming unbounded helplessness
in the face of authority, power
and social/economic/political and cultural structures
planted deep into their impoverished imaginations
and uncritical teaching of life’s bitter realities.
These are the people so easily manipulated
by 24/7 news,
by ideological constructs
planted deep within the popular culture
and the education system.
WHAT ARE THESE CONSTRUCTS?
Being an artist is living within and alternate, protesting state of being.
To be an artist (not a decorator, not an entertainer)
is to step away from one’s own class background
because to live within the collective unconsciousness
of a class riddled society
is to only be able to express one’s class values, wants and needs
all of which will be narrow, oppressive
and in opposition to progressive change.
“There is really only one liberal study
that deserves the name ‘liberal’
— because it makes a person free
— and that is the pursuit of wisdom.”
Seneca
FRIENDS (wrote Robert Reich),
“Today is a national day of mourning for Jimmy Carter,
who died on December 29 at 100 years old…
In a proclamation after Carter’s death,
In an interview with Thom Hartmann,
Carter said:
“Unlimited money in politics,
violates the essence of what made America a great country
in its political system.
Now it’s just an oligarchy**,
with unlimited political bribery being the essence
of getting the nominations for president
or to elect the president.
And the same thing applies to governors
and U.S. senators and congress members.
So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion
of our political system
as a payoff to major contributors,
who want and expect and sometimes get favours
for themselves after the election’s over.
REMEMBER
Those pictures from children's books:
profiles of yellow, black, brown and white,
with heads held high,
eyes seeing the same future.
NOTES
*with thanks to Darren Abrahams
whose conversation with me will be uploaded to my Substack
as one of the first of 6 discussions/interviews
with artists about creativity,
beauty, truth,
details about their working lives,
the art they produce
and about the nature of their creative voice.
** Oligarchy - a form of government
in which power rests with a small number of people.
The "iron law of oligarchy" states that all forms of organisation,
regardless of how democratic they may be at the start,
will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies,
thus making true democracy practically and theoretically impossible,
especially in large groups and complex organisations.
Thus will Musk-Vance and the orange man
will the destruction of the first democracy of the modern age?