Love for Art’s Sake and V.V.

The last thing anyone wants to hear is that which they fear is true about them. It’s also the thing about which they’re most curious to know and will torture anyone to hear.

Ah, intimacy! The intimate act! The intimate thought!

We’re not intentional liars, always, but the lie we most fear is the lie we tell ourselves to forget how as children, we made our world up, this lie hides what we are afraid is true.

In love there is no relationship for there is no separation.

What more is a relationship but a conspiracy of silence about separation?

Of what use is it to tell your lover how attached you are to your wife, or to tell your husband how deeply you love your lover?

What fears drive the sad buffoons we see in the mirror to waste hours and energy on exercise machines, taking nature for granted, as if, like youth, it will always be there.

What man in his arrogance wants to know how women who use him talk about him?

What woman wants to hear that inspiration is not in her thighs but rather, it is in the stars that the excitement of love sparks desire in her mate?

Love conquers, for a while, romantic love, that is, which is neither lust nor attachment and what is romantic?

This is where we come to Art, the invention of a solution to an imaginary problem.

Put aside analysis, for we lust, we love, we grow attached, each as separate experiences and often with different objects and each according to it’s own logic.

Romantic love, ephemeral and irrational, conquers—it is emotional trumps…when this card falls, fail to play it and you regret it forever, play it and play the fool.

Is it not better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all?

Love is the quality that distinguishes pet from prey

Art lives in the domain of love and we are each of us by turns and our stars, part nymph or satyr, part loyal and part lover. Art appeals to us in the spaces between.

Pornography is not defined by the explicitness of sexual performance but by purpose, which is to inspire lust, not to reflect upon or evoke love.

Lust graces art but the art lies not in lust.

Islamic fundamentalists are stars of pornography for they demonize lust, followed by priests, tribal leaders, cultists and other types of false prophets and power mongers.

The art of cinema, the novel, poetry, painting, sculpture in any form or media might suggest explicit sexuality that love may be revealed.

What is this thing called, love?

Love, revealed in the poetry of a garden, house paint, design of automobiles, the long arch of a bridge, wheels of a tractor, wavering lines of an orchard, apples fall as if in love.

Love is gravity, it is art that gives us wings.

Art is the antidote to despair, precisely the biological purpose of the capacity for love.

We call love frivolous, we can live without it, don’t need it or want it, think it secondary to happiness and success while our urban landscapes become grotesque halls of mirrors.

We call art frivolous, we can live without it, don’t need it or want it, think it secondary to happiness and success while our urban landscapes become grotesque halls of mirrors.

We think artists, like lovers, are self-indulgent, that the important business of life lies in moving stones and pounding iron into our generation’s legacy—a convenient lie…

…the lie that exalts the privileged, who move no stones, bear no arms, neither work the mines nor plow the fields, who are patrons we aspire to be as we view art in museums.

Yet, art is love though love may not be art.

Our species depends on our capacity for love, not for loyalty nor fidelity, nor agility nor lustful copulation per se…though such traits serve useful purpose, they don’t define us.

Love makes possible the careful development of children, without which, the species couldn’t achieve linguistic programming, enabled by certain genetic traits.

These most important traits dispose us to develop arcane languages, like algebra, music and intuition over generations to enable synthesis at higher levels of cognition.

Without love, the tiger eats her cub instead of passing on the knowledge of her ancestors and her own experience and we are more to be feared than tigers.

Deceived by their own rhetoric, religious fundamentalists hide from qualities we share with tigers and end up eating their own children with sauces of dogma.

Reverence reveals kinship with tiger, orangutan, egret, rabbit, bee, whale and dolphin—each social species having adapted over time, a formula consistent with environment.

We have survived by refinement of the social prime, the psycho-chemical phenomena we know as love, for which purpose arose the symbolic communication, known as, art.

Humanity shows up in art or does not show up.

Art invests symbols with emotion to evoke love associated with ideas and this may be exploited to misdirect child-like people, like most adults and all innocent children.

Art is a liar and lie we must to be loyal, to be true lovers and good parents.

Neither moral nor legal code can prevent abuse yet, when art thrives, love is revealed.

If art for love’s sake disappears, what remains is banal pornography of fundamentalism.

English Spanish Counter Intrusion

Children in Santa Maria, October 30, 2011In this nation of poor, blind fools led by rich, ruthless fools, we are under the illusion that “we” are white, Christian, western Europeans. Regardless of our own ethnic ancestry, we have always done our best to make the children of poorer immigrants regret their ethnic origin and exalted the foreign chíc of well-to-do newcomers to romantic excess.

At this moment, across the land and in media, we institutionally suppress expression of Spanish and Latin American native heritage and language. Descendants of these native Americans receive benefits for signing documents in which they describe themselves as “Latino” or “Hispanic” and then there are others we pay to call themselves, “Native American”, setting up another distinction in institutionalized discrimination.

Descendants of native Americans we call, "Latinos".
Descendants of native Americans we call, "Latinos".

Public school policies in California demean Hispanic tradition and teachers of Spanish-speaking ESL students are generally ignorant of the wealth of world literature that has been written in Spanish. Children learn to be ashamed of their appearance and heritage.

Long before Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and well before Gutenberg invented miniature metal type, the syntax that underlies the Spanish language was born in Mesopotamia, Persia,  Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Babylonia, all of which together contained more wisdom of life and nature than has been since scientifically discovered.

Sub-Americans, who make up 40% of our population (80% where I live), don’t know that our numeric and musical notation, mathematics and sciences of astronomy, physics, biology and chemistry incubated in their language as they were incorporated, for the benefit of commerce, into the Iberian peninsula’s spoken tradition that we call, Spanish, the written form of which was devised by Jews at the behest of the Iberian caliphates that governed Spain until they were driven away by tribes from the north, organized for the first time under the banner of Christianity by henchmen of Charlemagne’s dominion.

English is a wonderful language and my own. It amalgamated voices of Norsk sprog with Latin derivatives. Spanish, derived from Arabic, Latin, Persian, Greek and other sources is a more sonorous, sensual and emotionally expressive tongue. Castillian friars made the native Americans they enslaved learn Spanish for pragmatic reasons. They were not invited to explore Spanish literature–what good is a slave who thinks he is a human being? Here, in this town in California, where I live, 100,000 our of 130,000 citizens speak Spanish and wonderful works of Spanish literature gather dust on the shelves of  libraries, ignored by those who still have the most to gain from them.

The R Word

It’s easy to see why Martin Heidegger loved Adolph Hitler when you understand that racial genetic differences do include stereotypical traits when you take the Bell curve into account, which is just what an astute man like Martin would do. You can see genetic differences between people of the same culture, tribe, clan and family. Black people, generally, do have bigger dicks and yes, their skin has dark hue. Jews have small dicks and are good thinkers, Greeks are Jews who, like Arabs, use dicks as chairs. And so on. Naturally, a bunch of fanatic Jesuit Castillaños could enslave an entire continent of aboriginals, who lack the gene for common sense and the descendents of their combined progeny demonstrate that on the average, this genetic trait is both predominant and regressive.

Moral and ethical issues arise as much from ignoring these differences as they do from exploiting them. Ignoring them, you miss the implicit survival strategy these traits entail. The differences would not exist if each group had not employed them as a way to survive and it is revelatory to see how even traits like blind, stupid ignorance were genetically inscribed, which is, essentially what became, on average, of males of the human species.

What to do? What to do! You’d have to be blind, deaf and witless not to know what to do once you see this. The issue is not the differences but how you use the principle involved.