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.