What we are seeing here is the beginning of the endgame, one way or another. That perhaps, on some deeper level, is what we are experiencing — the shock that so many of us are experiencing these days. It’s not simply a reaction to the unexpected specific results of an election, but more that the great unraveling has truly begun: the future is arriving. And what comes next is so completely unknown. We’ve known that the unraveling will come. The radical end of one story and the beginning of another. The shock, as my brother and I shared with one another, is that it is now.
What we will watch, what we will witness, this century is either a great turning towards compassion, empathy, and a great lessening of human suffering, or we will witness the darkening of the human project. What we are now witnessing with the election of Trump as president of the United States is the beginning of the endgame. How we respond to this occurrence will be of great consequence. We choose. There is no one else.
I am a painter. I am a maker. Those of us that make, call it art, we must dare to know the power of our actions. They are of real consequence. Whether we are poets, whether we are writers, whether we are musicians, or painters or sculptors or creatives of any creed, color or disposition, what we do matters. We cannot know the consequences of our actions, but we should know that our actions ripple out into the world energetically, affecting our reality in ways we cannot imagine. Do not doubt this. Or rather, as the doubt arises, as it surely will, don’t follow it – there’s more important business at hand.
“I have placed before you life and death. Choose life. That you may live, you and your children.” Dvarim, 30:19
What we do, what we make, matters.
November 23, 2016
What extraordinary times.
What is needed is a believable description of the power and importance of our individual creative efforts. No matter what the medium is. If we are painters, if we are sculptors, writers, poets, musicians… We need a believable description of the efficacy of our making, whether it is experienced on a large scale — out there in media-land, or not.
We need this in order to deepen our engagement, creatively, with our form — and to bring the form to deep formal wholeness — in order to invest the form with our life force, because that is how the transformation occurs, the presence and life-force imbued.
And this transformation is necessary in order for us to continue to experience the power and worthwhileness of our makings, and for this sense and experience to radiate out into the world, through us and through our works. And this belief, this experience of the worthwhileness of our making, is necessary to know the goodness of living, of being in these bodies, of being here in this life. We need this.
Us aesthetic-form makers, we are necessary. Whether people care about painting or not, our making of paintings is necessary. For the larger human sense of goodness-of-being-alive. That is what our paintings do and what our making-of-paintings does. And we need that sense of goodness-of-being-alive today, because it is getting dark. And it looks like it may yet grow darker. And we need to believe in the goodness-of-being-alive.
Without that sense, without that deep knowing, game over. How, how else will we have the strength, in the coming days, to choose life?
November 28, 2016
