Category: Discussions/Essays

What now?

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder is one of art history’s great depictions of a world in chaos.

It’s been difficult to even think of writing in this tiny blog during what feels like tumultuous times. What value or weight can a little talk about art or creativity have in light of all the anxiety, pain and suffering we’re all feeling today. With almost daily news of political division and violence, economic uncertainty and hardship, not to mention the sense of hopelessness with regards to the future of humanity and our environment — everything feels meaningless, sad and most of all exhausting. Both repulsed and addicted to our technological devices, we are constantly captured by the attention merchants who aim to gain great material wealth at the expense of all else including our personal sovereignty and freedom.

“Men have become tools of their tools.” — Henry David Thoreau

Personally, even taking several months off of writing/teaching/working, I wasn’t able to escape from reality — perhaps we never can. We’re all human after all. Even the magic and joy we get from making art cannot stop the heart and mind from attending to what’s most important. And what’s going on in the world today IS IMPORTANT. When injustice, anger and oppressive violence dominate our environments, both physically and mentally (i.e. on screen), the mind can not help but try to make sense of what seems non-sensical. Unfortunately, tyrants and aggressors love chaos. Aligned with extreme wealth and advanced technologies, these dark factions of society ruin everything, from everyday work, to everyday living, even extending to the degradation of our arts and sciences. Everything gets contaminated; a toxic spread of greed and destruction that hits home and abroad.

“Intelligence is to not function in fragments.” — J. Krishnamurti

What can we do? How do we stay aware and sensitive, yet remain grounded and sane? Perhaps these times call on us to mature, to grow stronger, so we can see the big picture.

“Do not pray for easier lives, pray to be stronger men.” — John F. Kennedy

The words of the wise ring truer and more significant during hard times. We must hold dear to who we are morally, socially and creatively. Being an artist has always been wraught with fear and uncertainty. But perhaps it is our duty again as creatives to set examples of what is possible by continually trying to find and build joy and beauty for not just ourselves but others. Instead of following suit into an excessively selfish and transactional way of living, we must lead the world with our spirit of generosity.

“Desire is a force which motivates you to take what is outside and put in inside.
Love is a force with motivates you to give what is inside to the outside.” — Alan Watts

So, do not let chaos rule over you. Do not let the words of the powerful tell you how to think. Do not let their technologies dictate where you direct your attention because attentiveness is within our agency. Because ultimately, where we direct our attention, dictates our experience.

“Sin is not a distance, it is a turn of our gaze in the wrong direction.” — Simone Weil

And do not despair. Do not let bad feelings get you. Rest, recover and get back up to fight and live free. We must never fall into resignation or hate, which always leads to sin, to disaster. We must refuse conformity, exploitation and subordination. And no matter how hard it feels, we must design our lives ourselves (else they be designed for us). We must look to nature, to beauty, and to all things good. We must listen to our bodies and our hearts. We can focus on making things instead of accumulating them. We must resist evil.

“To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love.” — Chris Hedges

But most of all, we must continue to find and hold on to our solidarity, the common bonds we have with each other. This is the true sense of what it means to be religious whose entomology translates “to gather together in attention.” As hard as it is at times, we are our brother’s keeper; we must care for and help each other. Remember too, that this period of chaos, cruelty and madness will end. Mania and disorder, being unsustainable, always comes to an end. Because the universe is orderly and it is NOT silent. We must look forward to what will come after.

Dance by Henri Matisse.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” — Albert Camus

Be Creative or Be Complacent

“Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Philosopher

You have a choice to face each day: make art or give into comfort and convenience.

There’s a great price to pay for making art. The necessity of discipline, the often times painful sacrifices, the immeasureable patience before seeing results (of any kind), the enduring of self-doubt, the risk of financial insecurity, the withstanding of judgement and rejection, the loneliness, the sufferance of failure (which is common for any creative), and last but not least, the insurmountable amount of time and effort required to become a true and dedicated artist. Almost everything tests the resolve and courage of an artist’s well-being; he must perservere and persist through so much just to live authentically and to make something worthwhile, a small contribution to this world before his time is up.

Now, isn’t it just so much easier — and more rational — to take the pre-approved path for what’s sold as freedom and happiness? All you have to do is give in to the authority of the system, to the authority of tradition, to the authority of institutions whose continuous propaganda surrounds us. (The latest data shows that the average city dweller is exposed to between 4000 to 10,000 advertisements daily). Yet the price for giving in to complacency is much higher than we realize. This part of the package is rarely told to us. But what is complacency? Well, it’s choosing the slippery path that’s always easier to take. Call it entropy or laziness or call it the lack of love or cynical indifference — Dante called it sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins — but whatever name you give it, it’s always there luring you towards the path of least effort.

The Fifth Purgatory: Wrath, Sloth, and Avarice (Greed). From Dante’s Inferno. (notice how Sloth is accompanied here in Hell by Greed and Wrath, do they lead to one another?)

The Cost of Complacency:

Conformity – first off, you become a follower. You are a copier, not a creator. You don’t lead either yourself or others. You’ve become the ultimate definition of a herd animal, easily guided and swayed towards particular types of action. In a world of powerful self-interest and propaganda, you’re sheep for slaughter, designated to serve the system by those who designed the system. And now, living more and more interactively with technology, man risks becoming no longer the artibiter/designer of his actions but a conduit of the machine. Medical studies in 2025 show that two-thirds of the time man is on autopilot, driven by habit with minimal forethought. So everyday’s thoughts are the same, everything you do is the same, you are the same. Each day is but a mere replica of the previous day.

“We live in a world of replicas, and I try desperately in a world of replicas to produce things that are not replicas of anything.” — Carl Andre, Sculptor

Stupidity – you get dumber. This sounds cruel but it’s true. Use it or lose it; that’s a fundamental law of this universe. The more you give in to comfort and convenience, the more dependent you are on outsourcing your thinking and the less able your mind becomes. The lastest studies are already showing that people born after 1980 — whose most formative years coincided with the widespread adaptation of digital technology — are demonstrating an unprecedented drop in intelligence (by 7 points per generation). Consider how frightening that is, given the average IQ was only 100 points before 1975. Digital technology (namely, the advance of algorithms and now A.I.) encourages automation so it saves thinking time but destroys thinking ability. Life, and the way of doing things, becomes not only more automated but hurried, neglective and amoral. Like art, love and goodness requires time, attention and thoughtfullness.

“The most violent element in society is ignorance.” — Emma Goldman, Writer

Weakness – you lose strength. Not just of mind but of will. When you’re always choosing what’s fast and easy, you become more impatient and unaccepting of reality or truth. The unknown and the uncomfortable disturb you. You lose the ability to tolerate difficulty, including when it surfaces in relationships. You barely try and when you do, you give up easily. You soon dread hard work or things that take time. Things you don’t understand you deem stupid, while things that make you wait are boring. You get anxious and frustrated more easily. You turn to shortcuts and easy solutions which further compounds your mounting incompetence. You’re no longer self-reliant and struggle with silence. You begin to lack the courage or will to do anything challenging.

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.” — Albert Einstein, Scientist

Fear – privileged people always fear losing their advantage. Incompetent people know their privilege is short-lived. It’s like deep inside they know they’re not so capable. Instead of building skill, which takes time, they’ll choose to alter perceptions and create falsehoods to justify their actions because fear always generates stress and urgency thus amplifying their insecurity. It may seem oxymoronic but those who get used to the privilege of comfort and convenience become extremely neurotic and panicky when things don’t go their way. Like the bully who’s actually deeply afraid inside, the slothful are often demandingly obsessed with urgency. They often become greedy, critical, defensive, irritable and angry.

“The anxious life… is a series of embedded urgencies.” — Mark Fisher

Closed thinking – a complacent mind never thinks outside of the box. As modern man has become more externally focused he depends more on outside things; his sustenance, his pleasures, his security, and his escapes are all external. What appears as an array of choice in a commoditized society is merely a buffet of limited options. It’s all illusion. Where as the creative person exercises resourcefulness (an internal action), the slothful man seeks resources (an external approach). He inherently prefers standard solutions over extending the effort to innovate new ones. Thus, he will always choose efficiency over effectiveness and the familiar over the unusual. He thinks in terms of gains and losses while the process, the journey, means little to nothing to him. In fact, in his eyes, everything either good or bad comes from the outside. There is no accountibility. He knows no such thing as humility or penitence. Locked into his beliefs, he’s confident he’s right while being unknowingly asleep.

“He who looks outside dreams, he who looks inside awakens.” — Carl Jung, Psychologist

Vacuity – a life of convenience and continuous comfort always carries that feeling of emptiness. Without the expenditure of effort and the test of time, the mind will ultimately struggle to find real value. We all have experienced that it feels much better to build something versus when we merely buy it. Pleasure and joy are not the same thing. Commitment of time and energy is directly proportional to meaning and genuine satisfaction. The slothful mind can’t see that or won’t. He’d rather sit there and complain about his woes. And to fill that hole in his heart, he can look towards the multitude of addictive and pain-relieving substances or activities offered to him. Distraction and escape become the perpetual patching and repatching of a wound that only gets deeper and harder to repair. Meaningfulness alludes him.

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.”
― Robert Henri, Artist

Enslavement – the complacent man is perpetually trapped. When he becomes accustomed to the fast and easy way, he doesn’t realize he’s inside an echo chamber that reinforces his thoughts and behaviours so he becomes ever more reactive rather than contemplative. Dependent always on the external, he has taken away all agency over his own attention, action and attitude, the very things he actually has at his disposal. Now with the arrival of A.I. he will be coerced more and become more accustomed to utitilizing artificial digital imagery, outsource thinking to and communicate with artificial entities, confusing them all with what’s real. Without risking effort, he risks instead complete psychological imprisonment. The drive towards optimization is modern man’s search for the holy grail. Effort is a dominion of man’s imprint on this universe, without such arduous exertion he is but a spectator-passenger and not a participant. He may be breathing but he’s rarely present and thus, hardly free.

“(Artistic freedom) is a difficult kind of freedom that seems more like an ascetic discipline…such freedom assumes a healthy mind and body, a style that would reveal a strength of the soul and patient defiance. Like all freedom, it is a never-ending risk, a grueling experience, and that is why today we flee from such risk, just as we flee from freedom, which demands so much of us, and instead rush headlong into all kinds of enslavement, to at least obtain some comfort in our souls.” — Albert Camus, Writer